Notices

I remember making a couple map styles when TileMill was a Mapbox product and connected to their APIs. It's now a bit more work set up data for TileMill, but I remember basic styling, such as changing colors and changing the zoom levels at which elements are visible, being fairly easy. Things like symbols for POIs and road number shields are more complicated, but you can get quite far without those.

I'm not quite a designer, but definitely interested in map styling. However, I'm more likely to try to get my own online tileserver running and style that with the Mapbox GL JSON style format.

POIs were mainly taken from official openstreetmap style. There are probably several other sets that can be used. But you are right, its relatively simple task. Just needs someone to work on it with an eye on design. Let's see if someone will step up.

I am preparing for the next release that would alter Mapnik SQLite database schema. As a result, the new database will be incompatible with the current OSM Scout Server. So, if you need the maps now, please download them.

I expect to finish map imports and upload them to data.modrana.org in the next 24-48 hours. Within this timeframe the corresponding builds will be made and uploaded to OpenRepos/Harbour. For Harbour users: expect the new version appearing with a delay due to review by Jolla.

This timeline will hold assuming that there will be no surprises during the roll-out of the maps nor something will come out during the final testing.

As for Mapnik style development, I have reworked the current one including POI appearance and other details. The base is now OSM Bright version TM2.

Turned out that many map styles cannot be used as a base due to the copyright, including Mapbox Streets, for example. However, if someone wants to design a new style, especially color schemes, we could make it as follows. You could use Mapbox Studio or some other GUI to design it (please read fine print regarding the style that you want to use as a base, it should allow us to use the style without Mapbox servers; acknowledgment is fine - can always be added into About). When ready, let me know and share your Mapbox GL JSON style (including license of your work). I will then try to translate it into Mapnik stylesheet. While not optimal, it allows us to use simple GUI tools. Easiest would be to adjust just colors. Fonts and appearance of the roads, POIs at different levels are possible to change, but not that simple since it may require changes in map database.

The new release is out - 0.9.5, followed by 0.9.6.

In addition to updated translations (thank you for all involved), this release changes were related to polishing Mapnik backend. Via a simple patch, I have added support for TWKB geometry encoding in Mapnik/SQLite. This allowed to reduce the size of the Mapnik databases by roughly 2x times. Note that it maybe at expense of CPU usage during reading, but I did not notice any slowdown due to TWKB packing.

Second part of enhancements are related to the style of Mapnik rendering. I profiled rendering and adjusted stylesheet and underlying database layout to speed it up. However, on slower hardware and using small tiles, as with modRana, there might be some problems (see https://github.com/M4rtinK/modrana/issues/201 , possible fix waiting in review).

While Mapnik databases are large, further reduction of them would require investigation of alternative formats and possibly writing an additional input plugin for Mapnik. Taking into account that the current database file size seems to be smaller than "the-next-big-thing" vector tiles, reduction of the file size would be non-trivial project.

As for the map style, I am looking for someone who would like to work on them. As mentioned earlier, I'll be happy to adapt the styles from other formats, if available.

With the respect of further development, I was planning to extend search support to all available countries next. Also would have to update underlying libosmscout library to catch up with the development.

Would be great to know what are the further expectations of the users and what should be done in future with the respect of the server. See https://github.com/rinigus/osmscout-server/issues for current TODO list.

PS: 0.9.6 fixed a typo in Mapnik style that slowed down at z<9

Looks like something went terribly wrong while importing the planet. At least, Latvia got roads and nodes from all over Europe. I suspect that planet.pbf was updated while I was downloading it leading to a very strange import for at least that country. Please let me know if you see errors in the territory that of interest for you. If its just few countries, I can update country-by-country faster. Latvia is uploaded now and will be probably in the data.modrana.org server in few hours.

I will redownload the planet and make a new import in the next few days.

Edit: Guatemala and Latvia are fixed and available on the maps distribution server.

@rinigus. Thanks. It's good for my two regions.

Many thank @rinigus

Thank you very much for this piece of gold for Sailfish offline navigation. I have no words to be grateful for your work! Thank you very much @rinigus !

@ferlanero: thank you for your kind words. Note that large work is made by everyone working on the client part of the solution. Without excellent GUI clients, there would be no offline solution!

The new databases for countries and territories are uploaded to data.modrana.org. So, all of you who had problems with the previous upload, please check if its resolved. For countries that I tested with, it all seemed to be fine. In addition, planet download was checked against MD5 in the scripts now, which should improve robustness of the import. For those, who did not have any problems, please wait few days to avoid majorly stressing the data.modrana.org over the weekend . Please let me know if there are still bugs with the import.

Now I wonder if anything has to be changed in Mapnik style? Comments/suggestions?

You are right @rinigus. Big thank, for all those who have made navigation possible in SFOS too @MartinK @otsaloma