I’m converting osm maps and using them on my Garmin. But there’s a lot of landmarks, restaurants etc. that I don’t want - I’d like to delete all the POIs and load just roads and shapes to my Garmin. Is it possible to select all these POIs (I guess all the single nodes?) in JOSM and then delete them? I wouldn’t upload all the deletions to the openstreetmap server of course - just for my Garmin. Right now I’m selecting each node manually and deleting them but that doesn’t feel very smart 
Afaik this is not possible using JOSM. What you can do is build a SAX parser preprocessor in a script language like PHP, Ruby, Perl etc (have a look at the svn repository for inspiration) to filter those nodes and feed the resulting osm-xml to Mkgmap.
Fair enough. I’m pretty good with Ruby so I’ll give it a try. Can someone help me get started so I’m not spinning my wheels? Just the steps in words is fine.
Lambertus - can you elaborate on “look at the svn repository”? i.e. for what program?
You can download the source at:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Getting_The_Source
or browse it at:
If the file isn’t too big, you might make it with a JOSM seach on place amenity shop place etc.
Not an expert on MKGMAP, but wouldn’t you also do the trick by deleting all the POI references from map_features.csv ?
The first assumption that the POI’s are single nodes is not correct. Theatre and schools are also polygons.
Not sure which Garmin you use, but the POI’s like shops etc can be switched off in the Garmin etrex HCx Vista, under map (only have the Dutch version where it is Kaart instellingen). Just as deleting the amenity node, you will miss bus stops and similar.
I have the Nuvi 260 and there’s no option to switch off POIs.
I guess I’ll go with Lambertus’ suggestion to do post processing [in Ruby] and see how that goes. I looked and most of the POIs in my area are single point nodes so that will take care of the bulk of the problem which is good enough for me 
On a separate note, I entered my email address and also have “Subscribe to this topic” checked but I never receive email notifications of replies. Anyone else have that problem?
OSM Composer (see OSM wiki) is a tool that creates maps for Garmin out of OSM data. This might be interesting for you because you can customize the style, that is, what is converted to the Garmin map and how. So you could set the conversion of all the POI etc. that you don’t want to “don’t convert” and wouldn’t have to fiddle with XSLT.