I notice that occasionally, new symbols and images get uploaded to the Trac which get displayed on the main Slippy Maps. I am wondering if there is a way we can “fast track” the addition of new symbols to the slippy maps and add our own (no copyright restriction) symbols. I admit it is frustrating punching in data to OSM and not being able to see all of your hard work.
I know that you can host your own file server which can render tiles for you with your own parameters which controls what gets displayed or not but this is too complicated for me. The OSM Style Editor http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/~panman/styledit/ is one way but only covers the Netherlands it seems. Useless for me as I live in Australia. If there is an easy, straight forward way to set up a free server to do this (i doubt there is), please tell me.
Have you tried wirting Mapnik stylesheets for those icons? I’m not sure there is anyone here that knows how they should be displayed and where. The more work you do the faster things goes.
I’ve also wanted the OSM Mapnik Style Editor to work in my area. Sadly that won’t be very flexible either unless you only want to edit the map styles and not the OSM data. And it’s horribly horribly slow, but oh so wonderful anyways.
Steve Chilton is the person who does most work on the Mapnik stylesheets. He doesn’t use this forum AFAIK, but you can find him on the mailing lists or IRC (steve8).
Steve is a cartographer by training and - rightly in my opinion - is anxious not to clutter the map with too much detail, which is perhaps the main reason why the Mapnik layer easily holds its own in clarity against the commercial sites. OSM is a data repository first and foremost, a webmapping site second: the aim is to collect information that people will find useful, not just to build an open version of Google’s map tiles.
The Osmarender layer is (again IMO) less rigorous in terms of traditional cartography, and it may be more appropriate to add extra things there.
As for shields in particular? Interesting question. OSM currently renders road refs in a universal fashion - is country-specific rendering a good thing (more familiar to locals) or not (effectively splits the maps into many separate maps, making equivalence across nations less easy)?
It’s good to hear that Steve is KIS. Well as long as it’s not hard to have different styles in different countries then I would say that diversity is good. Google is currently doing the shield rendering for the US, and different colours, it’s still a pretty bland map IMHO.