1ec5
commented
1 year ago Needless to say, the road data in OHM isn’t quite where it needs to be for an OHM Americana to look anything like OSM Americana. But a road-centric style could help motivate existing road mappers and, more importantly, attract roadgeeks from other open-content projects that stand to gain from a visualization of historic roads.
The style switcher is currently being utilized for different artistic alternatives to the main Historic style, but this mechanism would also be useful for thematic styles, such as transportation. #405 proposes a railroad-themed style, so I think a more road-centric style would be good for balance.
OpenStreetMap Americana could be a good starting point for something resembling a road atlas. Like the Historic style, it’s a client-side style applied to vector tiles downloaded to the client. This means adapting it to OpenHistoricalMap is mainly a matter of adjusting the filters and such to refer to OHM’s tile schema instead of OpenMapTiles. The style conforms to the MapLibre Style Specification, which is almost one-for-one compatible with the Mapbox Style Specification that ohm-website currently requires.[^mapbox]
At this point, the main Americentric detail in OSM Americana is that the road linework and labeling hews to North American conventions instead of European/Commonwealth conventions – that is, road classifications affect line widths rather than line colors. But road classification in OHM is such an unexplored topic that I don’t think this difference should be considered a showstopper.
[^mapbox]: Except for
text-rotation-alignment: viewport-glyphto keep shields upright, which is only part of the MapLibre Style Specification: maplibre/maplibre-gl-js#716.