Right now the main OpenStreetMap.org stylesheet uses Unifont as a fallback font to render Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, as well as any other characters not present in the DejaVu font. Unifont is mainly designed to support all characters, and is not designed to look good.

I’m looking at Droid Sans Fallback, a free font developed for Android, and evaluating if it would be a better fallback font than Unifont. Because I don’t read Chinese, Japanese or Korean, I could use help.

I have prepared a demo at http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html with three layers: conventional OSM.org, tiles without any fallback font, and tiles using Droid Fallback as a fallback font.

What I would like is for people to look at the difference between the conventional OSM.org and Droid Fallback tiles and see which is easier to read for the CJK glyphs. The tiles without any fallback font can be used to find areas where DejaVu doesn’t have glyphs and the fallback font is being used.

Some examples

Japanese cities: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#9/35.443/138.247

Japanese train stations: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#16/36.415/139.325

Korean cities: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#9/37.25/127.22

Chinese tourist attraction: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#15/39.94/116.48

Please keep in mind that

• My server is not nearly as powerful as tile.osm.org, so renders slower and has less cached data
• Only Asia is loaded on my server
• The data is a couple of days old and isn’t being updated

I would like some feedback on if Unifont or Droid Sans Fallback looks better. Please keep in mind that I don’t read the languages being rendered.

I had to write some osm2pgsql command lines for benchmarking recently. This is how it feels

Just a preview of what I’m working on right now

Today I surveyed both the new Westbound Port Mann Bridge and the north portion of the SFPR. Either of these would of been a lengthy trip in itself, combined they took two hours of driving to get traces and I still didn’t get everything surveyed.

I used my camera to take photos with an interval of 8 seconds and my eTrex 20 sampling at 1 Hz, then correlated everything in JOSM.

I got off at 152 Street and went along 104 Avenue to cross over at 160th. I drove around the south side of the forest on the slope before heading over to join up with the SFPR, 104 Avenue and 176 Street Extension intersection. Little did I know how many times I would be going through here.

I then headed south to Highway 15, 96 Avenue and Golden Ears Way, heading down Golden Ears to do a U-turn in a side street. I then went straight on to the SFPR through the 104 Avenue intersection. From here it was an easy drive on new quiet pavement with no chance to turn off or turn around until King Road and 138 Street. I was struck by how few cars there were on the road. There were occasional trucks but I didn’t see another car going my direction. The view was rather nice in parts

… See full entry

After some technical and legal work, I now have a number of imagery layers hosted on a rented server.

These layers cover from Vancouver to Hope in 20cm or better and Lions Bay to Pemberton as 40cm or better. 10cm imagery is available for Vancouver, Richmond, Ladner, West Delta, the North Shore, Whistler and Surrey.

Most of the imagery was taken in 2009, but Surrey is from 2011.

I’ve prepared a page with links to the imagery and Potlatch2 and JOSM URLs at http://imagery.paulnorman.ca/tiles/about.html

Some layers may be slow initially loading at high zooms as they may need to fetch from a remote server.

An example of two layers from there and Bing is http://imagery.paulnorman.ca/tiles/surreyexample.png. Starting in the top left going clockwise the layers are Surrey2011, DataBC bc_gvrd_east_2009 and Bing.

Note: This post is a duplicate of a talk-ca mailing list post

After nearly a month on a 4-drive RAID0 array…

time ~/osm/osmosis-0.40.1/bin/osmosis --rb planet-120401.osm.pbf --lp interval=60 --wd database=osm user=openstreetmap password=openstreetmap allowIncorrectSchemaVersion=yes 2>&1 | tee apidb.log
5-May-2012 4:27:02 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Osmosis Version 0.40.1
5-May-2012 4:27:02 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Preparing pipeline.
5-May-2012 4:27:02 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Launching pipeline execution.

...

1-Jun-2012 8:36:48 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Pipeline complete.
1-Jun-2012 8:36:48 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Total execution time: 2347785558 milliseconds.

real    39129m46.249s
user    1418m52.368s
sys     415m9.705s

Surrey, BC is holding an Open Data Hackathon on Sunday November 20th. More
details are at http://www.surrey.ca/city-services/10036.aspx

I will be attending and looking at writing some new conversion scripts.

Does anyone have suggestions for any printed OSM materials to bring?