On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 6:22 AM, Andy Allan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Inge Wallin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > In some places the streets are very short.  This makes it difficult to
> show
> > the name of the street in full.  However, for most street names there
> exist a
> > short form. In swedish most names are of the form Foogatan (Foo street)
> or
> > Barvägen (Bar road).  These are often shortened to Foog. or Barv. in
> > commercial maps.
> >
> > It would be nice if we could tag this in OSM with something like:
> >
> >  name=Foovägen
> >  name:sh=Foov (or name:short)
> >
> > *and* that the renderers would take this into account where it is
> applicable.
> > The whole scheme is irrelevant if the renderers don't use it.
> >
> > An alternative would be that the renderers have a table of common
> > abbreviations like:
> >
> >  road: rd
> >  street: str
> >  vägen: v (swedish)
> >  gatan: g (swedish)
> >  Straße: str (german)
> > ...etc
>
> I think the rendering decisions should be left up to the renderers,
> where possible, rather than adding extra tags. It's not inconceivable,
> for example, for the length of the displayed road to be calculated and
> the name shortened where possible using a lookup table as you suggest.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>

It might be nice to be able to provide explicit hints, though. Garmin GPS
devices have a mechanism where you can insert special characters in the
label of a street, etc. to indicate that parts of the label before or after
that special character can be hidden at lower zooms. That means, for
example, that you could hide the "Street" or "Drive" suffix so that it only
shows the base name if there isn't room for the entire name. In most cases
we could probably sort that out automatically, but I'm sure somebody could
think of examples where it would fail. So it would be nice to be able to
look for hints first, then fall back to the default processing for
shortening names. This could work with European/Scandanavian shortenings,
too, such as the OP mentioned.

Karl
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