I understand Mapnik has some caption collision avoidance built in, yes? Can someone explain what the rules are?
I ask because of this: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.1988&lon=0.4122&zoom=14&layers=B00FF You can see there's a series of small villages, Saxon Street, Little Ditton, Woodditton, Stetchworth dotted over the area, but the name of probably the most significant is missing, which is rather disturbing as it gives an incorrect sense of incompleteness. If you follow the road South West and then West from Stetchworth you come to a crossroads with the B1061. A point very close to that crossroads is Dullingham (as you can see if you either zoom out or zoom in one level). I'm guessing that the collision detection is giving preference to the B1061 label. Is this a deliberate precedence, or is it just which is seen first? If the latter, is it possible to implement a precedence. I think place names are considerably more important - especially if other place names are present - than the road numbers, which will generally be repeated anyway. And in general to have a hierarchy of which is rendered by precedence - e.g. the name of a primary road is more important than a tertiary and so on. Also for points, what about moving the caption slightly. Are you using some kind of grid of cells to decide whether an area of map is occupied by a caption? If so rather than abandoning it at first go, might it be possibly to try neighbouring cells in an outwardly expanding spiral up to some limit deemed too far? In this case it wouldn't matter a jot if the name Dullingham was shown 1mm further south. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk