Unlike you I find the combined names a clever solution to this conundrum, which I note your alternative does not actually address otherwise

Actually, no - based on local knowledge, Kex Gill is the major name here; Nun Ings is just some random name that someone has copied from an old map. Old OS maps are full of these, and unfortunately some people have copied them willy-nilly into OSM.

Have a look at OS OpenMap StreetView for some of these old names (but note there that Kex Gill is the larger one) and at the newer OS OpenMap Local where Nun Ings does not appear at all. The name on the heath is just a made-up one; it only occurs in OSM.

The vector version is live already - see https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index.html#15.94/52.947792/-1.209111 for the area in the picture above.

That map on that site covers UK and Ireland, but it’d be relatively easy for someone to create a similar map for a different area. The script used to create the map just takes Geofabrik areas as parameters (so here “europe britain-and-ireland”). You could use “europe france” as a parameter in the script to get a similar map for France, and as long as the machine generating the times didn’t run out of memory (there are ways of preventing that) it should “just work”.

I’ve also made similar changes to the raster version of the same map, so “different sized trees” should appear there too.

3 renderings example: - small tree icon (diam<5) - medium (5<diam<10) - large (diam>10)

Based on the usage that taginfo suggests I’m actually using four sizes - “<=10”, “>10”, “>20” and “>30”. There are enough of the larger two to justify them being there as well; but above 35 some values seem to become silly.

Also have to think about not hiding objects under the trees while rendering

A couple of lines in the style try and do that. One is icon-allow-overlap (and also the way that the tree icon is drawn it’s designed to not look messy when drawn over others), and another is text-optional, which means that the icon will be shown even if there is no room for the text.

It’d be a licence, but not an open one.

Json has such a clause and it isn’t considered an open licence.

Who gets to decide what is “good” and what “not good”? You? Me? Santa?

how to serve my own tile server using the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet

That’s using raster tiles, do do that on you’re laptop I’d suggest installing WSL with either Debian or Ubuntu running there and then follow these instructions. If that isn’t an option but Docker is, try these.

If you want vector tiles then I’d (as mentioned earlier) suggest Tilemaker under WSL and then Apache + mod_mbtiles. This was intended as a “soup to nuts” guide to doing that on Linux, but all but the “obtaining a server” part of that would likely also apply to WSL. You’ll then have to fiddle around with the Windows firewall (but then as a Windows developer you’re presumably used to doing that).

Was there any reason why you chose Windows Server here (other than “it was what you had lying around”)? Windows versions of OSM tools always suffer because basically “no-one developing them uses Windows”.

One thing that you might try include WSL - I’ve not tested that on your particular environment but I’d be surprised if it didn’t work, based on the things that have worked in the past.

Serving vector tiles is basically just “serving a small portion of a big file”. In the past I’ve used Apache on Windows without problems, so one avenue to explore might be that with mod_mbtiles. I haven’t tried that on Windows, but it works fine on Debian Linux.

The check I use for displaying “is there a sidewalk on a road” on maps is https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-vector-extract/blob/main/resources/process-sve01.lua#L1790 .

An example of a map that you can make with that is https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index_svwd08.html#9.34/52.2054/-1.5605 - that only shows primary and secondary roads if you can walk on them. It wouldn’t be that difficult if you wanted to create a set of vector tiles in that schema for California.

@kumakyoo yes - that mostly makes sense, and assuming that leisure is an area feature and highway a linear one unless there’s an explicit area tag is certainly an approach, but you will find some values for which this isn’t true - highway=pedestrian is one example, most closed highway=pedestrian ways without an area tag are actually areas.

and reloading the database on the OSMF servers.

When I make a request to an OSMF vector tile it’s to something with a URL like https://vector.openstreetmap.org/shortbread_v1/9/252/166.mvt .

How is the reload process done - is it just a reload of the database from which those .mvt files are generated, or a regeneration of all .mvt files as well?

I ended up creating a bunch of scripts to manage the loading and unloading of vector tiles and map styles, including the icons and sprites.

That meant that when I created a new test style I only needed to create one file - the style .json and run one command with a bunch of parameters to deploy it.

However, the “elephant in the room” is still the large, uncommentable .json file - having “something sane from which that is generated” would clearly be much better.. I’ve used layer ids that indicate sources layer and min/maxzoom, but styles are still a bit of a handful to edit.

I notice you also have “area” information in there too - How do you cope with things like man_made=pier which (if linear) will not an area feature but (if closed) will be?

Also - what about things like leisure=track and highway=raceway which can be either areas or linear, depending on whether an area=no or area=yes tag is present (and can be unclear without, although being a multipolygon relation nudges towards area)?