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New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

maps.stamen.com

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Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#31

Post by thingie »

noduerme wrote: post #15

Really, gorgeous work. The "Toner" version is really well done and incredibly useful for anybody who needs to laser print / xerox a ton of maps. I can tell the server's choking right now so I'm going to stop playing with it, but I wanted to say the design choices here are truly excellent in balancing level of detail with readability. Great job.

Well, it has few bugs. Or, perhaps, it wasn't meant to be used outside of the US. Compare this:

http://maps.stamen.com/toner/#17/49.19512/16.60929

http://osm.org/go/0Jv1v7aY4-

(I guess I could just fork it and try to fix it, but I'm not sure how. I wish there was a tileset that wouldn't give so much prominence to the roads, but rather to the aspects that matter in the city. Important buildings and landmarks, foot-only pathways, public transit lines. Freeway is just an obstacle.)

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#32

Post by kitsune_ »

I wish there were tiles similar to swiss cartographer Eduard Imhof's shaded relief maps. In my opinion, this is slowly but surely becoming a lost art form: http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/imhof/imhof3.html, http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/imhof/imhof8_e.html

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#33

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

kubrickslair wrote: post #14

Loved the watercolor tile. And a plea to HN folks: I am working on a project, and it will be great if someone can point me to a way to dynamically apply such a filter to vector derived solid color images. I am thinking of running a GIMP server, but I find the plugins available limiting. I have very limited image processing experience, and this was not a major part of the product, so had put it on the backburner. I wi…

The most important thing in watercolors is the texture of the paper.

They use a texture for sea, another for land, and so on. If you look at the see you will see how the sea and land repeats itself. You will need to make a seamless texture that you can repeat ad infinitum. Those are made with filters on photoshop or GIMP, or you could crreate them using fractals(very difficult for it to feel like a realistic watercolor, that is the reason they did not used them).

I don't like GIMP for that, plugins had a very confusing syntax, I prefer ImageMagick or better I use my own programs. Using Photoshop you can do it "with your hand"(selecting a vector shape, grow it with border transition, apply texture, and repeat), record and then use the macro for all your vectors.

I would use an OpenCL or CUDA program, faster and way more control.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#34

Post by 178 »

sad_panda wrote: post #27
noduerme wrote: post #15

Really, gorgeous work. The "Toner" version is really well done and incredibly useful for anybody who needs to laser print / xerox a ton of maps. I can tell the server's choking right now so I'm going to stop playing with it, but I wanted to say the design choices here are truly excellent in balancing level of detail with readability. Great job.

Really? In that tileset, bodies of water are like toner cartridge death. I bet my printouts will start looking banded and faded after a few dozen pages of it.

Granted, there could be a "mostly water" version of the toner tiles, but most people are printing out the tiles of the land. But anyhow, if a little black kills your cartridge you should get a new printer.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#36

Post by robin_reala »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #16
Androsynth wrote: post #5

In another case where users have been trained by google product methodologies: I just got pissed because scrolling my mouse wheel doesn't zoom.

The map framework they are using supports mouse wheel zoom but i think they chose not to use it so you could use your scroll wheel to scroll the page.

I do that quite often when embedding maps. It’s a toss up between the UI help of scrolling, and the interruption of normal page scroll.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#37

Post by liotier »

vidarh wrote: post #19
lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

"Everyone" won't ever use OSM - its license is prohibitively restrictive for a lot of uses. It's great for anyone that don't want to combine it with data they can't release, but for anyone that needs to mash it up with proprietary data, it's a non-starter by design. I think a lot of people don't realize this, as I've seen more than one company use OSM data in ways that either puts them in conflict with the license or…

There is nothing that restricts the display of a proprietary data layer on top of an OSM render : in the resulting mashup, the variously licensed sources of data each remain in its own layer and there is therefore no mixing of conflicting licenses.

On the other hand, if you produce new data by processing OSM data or mixing it with your own, then you are constrained by the bounds of Openstreetmap's license.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#38

Post by vidarh »

liotier wrote: post #37
vidarh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone" won't ever use OSM - its license is prohibitively restrictive for a lot of uses. It's great for anyone that don't want to combine it with data they can't release, but for anyone that needs to mash it up with proprietary data, it's a non-starter by design. I think a lot of people don't realize this, as I've seen more than one company use OSM data in ways that either puts them in conflict with the license or…

There is nothing that restricts the display of a proprietary data layer on top of an OSM render : in the resulting mashup, the variously licensed sources of data each remain in its own layer and there is therefore no mixing of conflicting licenses. On the other hand, if you produce new data by processing OSM data or mixing it with your own, then you are constrained by the bounds of Openstreetmap's license.

> On the other hand, if you produce new data by processing OSM data or mixing it with your own, then you are constrained by the bounds of Openstreetmap's license.

.. such as the moment you provide a function to generate PDF versions of the maps, or any number of other features that end up mixing the data. So in effect you either accept severely limiting your features, or you use other sources of map data.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#39

Post by vidarh »

00joe wrote: post #30
vidarh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone" won't ever use OSM - its license is prohibitively restrictive for a lot of uses. It's great for anyone that don't want to combine it with data they can't release, but for anyone that needs to mash it up with proprietary data, it's a non-starter by design. I think a lot of people don't realize this, as I've seen more than one company use OSM data in ways that either puts them in conflict with the license or…

I think you can layer data on top of tiles from osm with the openlayers api without licensing issues.

You're right that you can do probably that if you only ever keep the layers separate. The moment you e.g. provide export functions that combine the layers, you're currently in a grey area. With the new license, it's no longer a grey area, but you explicitly need to release your source data to be in compliance.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#40

Post by liotier »

vidarh wrote: post #38
liotier wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing that restricts the display of a proprietary data layer on top of an OSM render : in the resulting mashup, the variously licensed sources of data each remain in its own layer and there is therefore no mixing of conflicting licenses. On the other hand, if you produce new data by processing OSM data or mixing it with your own, then you are constrained by the bounds of Openstreetmap's license.

> On the other hand, if you produce new data by processing OSM data or mixing it with your own, then you are constrained by the bounds of Openstreetmap's license. .. such as the moment you provide a function to generate PDF versions of the maps, or any number of other features that end up mixing the data. So in effect you either accept severely limiting your features, or you use other sources of map data.

No - as long as the other items have no dependency on or interaction with the OSM layer, the generated PDF is clear of license conflict: it is still merely a composite display of independent sources, not a work produced on the basis of OSM data. If the OSM data was rendered without modification then it is not necessary to release the other data sources. Cf. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cas...
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