Artificially increase visibility of village in provence?

Hi, I will be visiting the area around Sault in the Provence. When I look at the immediate area on my GPS not a single village name is visible until you zoom right in, making navigation in the area almost impossible. As it is fairly central to the “totally empty area” would it be possible to somehow enhance Sault to make it appear earlier on maps as a reference (i.e. when zoomed further out)? For example, similar to Gordes, which is to the south west.

Hi,
In my computer, the Gordes name appears with the same size as the one of Sault. So this is depend of your media that you use.

I agree with you that the UI (interface with the user) on a navigator as Firefox should be improved to revealed the village names in sparsely populated zone.

Perhaps, add a ticket in the wishlist on https://trac.openstreetmap.org/newticket.

But also note that your GPS device can be the alone responsible of the visible layout of OSM. So ask to your GPS vendor or to the OSM map to GPS converter software.

Regards.

Thanks. I created https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/5459#ticket. All the same, if anyone knows how to increase the visibility of a town/village for such extremely low population density areas, and it is considered OK to do so very sparingly in such situations, please let me know. Thanks

Image Maker,

you write that you look at your GPS loaded with an OSM-map. I assume you downloaded one of the map that are available for Garmin? The makers of those maps are not looking at trac.openstreetmap.org Bug reported there are only for the www.openstreetmap.org website.

You will have to contact the producer of the map to ask for an improvement. However, I fear there is no easy solution for this, I haven’t met a map that increases the importance of features when there are no competing features to be displayed.

(p.s. I hope no one sees this as a reason to change the tagging of the villages in that area)

If it’s a Garmin device the usual options are:

  1. Set the device to show either “more / most detail” or explicitly select at what zoom levels you want things to appear it. Which option you get (and there may be more) depends on which Garmin it is and what software it is running.

  2. Search for cities - it should find all the villages.

Perhaps asking over at https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/ would make sense? You’ll need to say what device you’re using and where you got the map from.

Hi escada,
This is actually exactly the discussion I was hoping to have. As you can see from ticket 5459 this complete lack of naming detail over a HUGE area applies both to “OSM pure” in the web and to my GPS (in my case openmtbmap) i.e. Would it be reasonable to modify village attributes in special cases, which I expect would solve this issue on multiple platforms, or whether this is completely taboo in all conceivable situations.

Yes, a Garmin 62s. I have tried this. When zoomed out, the problem is that the village names appear at the same time as the countless little roads in the area and the map is suddenly so full that it is unusable.
I am not aware of any way to achive this increased density in “OSM pure” but I just discovered the “humanitarian” overlay, which certainly contains more village names than the “standard” view at the same zoom level, so this problem appears to be solvable.

Good idea. I will give this a try again. The sheer number of available place names used to crash my old GPS 60csx.

Short answer: No, it’s not reasonable. Longer answer: That’s mapping for 1 renderer. What about people that want to count little villages ? They can no longer do that when you changed them to town status just to show them on a map. The data has to match the reality, an hamlet should be mapped as such, not as a village. it’s up to the renderers to come up with good algorithms to solve such problems. (Another problem is e.g. that the Belgian capital is almost never shown because “Belgie - Belgique - Belgien” is always placed over it).

The Humanitarian style solved the problem, because they focus on maps for less populated areas. Their map is probably not as useful in crowded areas, as they will show too many labels. That’s what I meant with my first remark. You can solve the problem rather easily for unpopulated areas, but there is no solution that I know of that works well around the world. I believe this has been discussed already with e.g. the maintainers of the standard style on osm.org.

Incidentally, there’s at least one web map that varies “feature prominence” depending on whether something is in a built-up area or not - http://cycle.travel/map . I’m sure that it would be technically possible to do something like what you want for a web-based map, but very difficult, especially if it also had to deal with map updates on the fly. Both the “standard” and “humanitarian” map styles are freely downloadable and modifiable, as is everything needed to set up your own tile server to work with them https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ , so if you fancy having a go at coding “this village is not near other villages or towns so give it more prominence” there’s literally nothing stopping you - but as escada says it’s a rendering decision, and we shouldn’t be bodging the data because something doesn’t work in one particular renderer.

Hi everyone, Thanks for your answers. It all makes sense - got it :slight_smile: