OK, probably a dumb question, but the border of my county is also a creek. I’ve drawn a way over this creek for the county border and tagged it that way, but is it possible, with the correct tags to also have it rendered as a creek?
I’ve heard not sure if this is correct that Mapnik has troubles rendering the same way with two different styles. Further I’m not sure it’s a good idea to tag the same way with something that is as abstract as a county border and as a Creek.
I actually had to look up Creek on wikipedia, and can’t you just draw a new way and tag that as a waterway=*. (I always thought a creek was something deeper.)
Yeah I could draw a new way, but this creek is almost 100 miles long and very windy. None the less, sound like I’ll have to re-draw it.
Anyone know if there is an editor out there that can copy / paste a whole way?
Not sure if borders as relations are rendered properly, but it seems logical to me to have all the ways determining the border in a relation. This way you can select the creek and add it to the border relation without having to draw as second way at all. But you’ll have to lookup to determine if border relations are supported.
mapnik only supports type=route and type=multipolygon. See osm2pgsql in trac. The code is very efficient at the moment, and can of course handle other “type=” relations, if you add them… 
PS smiley DS…
I’d agree that a relation is the way to go - it’s a really good use of the concept.
I’m sort of new around here and have never used relations before. Can someone please explain to me how I would do this? I’ve checked out the wiki page on relations and multipolygon, but still not catching on. Here is what I want to do:
I live in a county that consists of a Northern boundary which is a creek, a southern boundary which is also a creek, a western boundary that is a lake and a major river, and an eastern boundary that is a just a line on a map and is nothing physical. These ways are all already drawn, but the northern and southern boundaries that are small creeks I would like to have rendered both as creeks and also the county boundary w/o having to draw the creeks way twice… How can I use relations to do that.
I use the JOSM mostly so that’s what I’ll talk about. If you use the online ‘Potlatch’ editor then you’ll have to search the wiki to find how it’s done in that editor but the steps are basically the same.
So, let’s begin:
- Read JOSM relations Howto first.
- Load your county in the editor.
- Select the creeks, river and the line representing the eastern boundary.
- Create a relation according to the Howto.
- Add tags to the relation according to the Boundary relation definition page.
- Upload the changes to the server.
You may have to draw new boundary ways depending on where the boundary is in the river and lake, i.e. depending on the either the bank or the center of the water being the boundary.
Now you’ll have to wait until the renderers start using boundary relations.