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Doctor_Fegg

"OpenStreetMap... the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary"

It absolutely wouldn't. Download TileMill or its successor, Mapbox Studio. Adjust the (Carto)CSS. Done.

Though for a map of this scale I'd probably work straight from Natural Earth[1] without involving OSM, to be honest.

Looks great, anyway.

[1] http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

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I get the impression he's not just talking about coloring, but also about what labels to show, how to space and lay them out, etc. He mentions this explicitly:

> [...] the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job [...]

You can edit all of that with CartoCSS. OP made a great map, but Mapbox Studio really is ideal for a project like this.

https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio

It doesn't follow that because CartoCSS/Mapbox studios is "editable", "customizable", and "easy", that the specific combinations of configuration and adjustment available would meet his complex criterion of minimizing time, effort, money, and aesthetics. I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want, and I'm not convinced from the one-off choice it would have been a 100% better idea for the OP to use.

It might have been a better choice, and maybe he didn't evaluate the option, but I still imagine the complexity of these options for the OP's specific aesthetic taste is quite large.

There is indeed no great solution to 'prominence' in the OSM data. There have been efforts to add population information to places, and to promote so called villages into so called towns when they are locally important, but those efforts have not been completely systematic (so they might be better in Austria than Minnesota, and even worse in Wisconsin).

Which is one reason to turn to the Natural Earth data, it has been curated more systematically than OSM.

> There is indeed no great solution to 'prominence' in the OSM data.

There has been lots of research about how to automatically produce Goldilocks Maps (enough information - but not too much) - I remember an article (whose URL I can't locate) which showed increased readability by pruning minor location names when they are too close to major locations. Google does that sort of thing well, but they are not the only ones nowadays - for example the osmfr Openstreetmap style does, in my opinion, a decent job of prioritizing labels: http://tile.openstreetmap.fr/

If you look at the database queries (search "placenames" here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cquest/osmfr-cartocss/mast... ), it is largely leaning on population data.

I looked around the local area here and it turns out to be quite reasonable, but there are also more than a couple misses, where the more notable town/village in a pair is suppressed.

..or get the best of both worlds with a data mashup.

> I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want

As i noticed the other day, they certainly have a very precise notion of where Great Britain is:

http://i.imgur.com/GMqYfkM.png

>Google Maps is optimized to a T

example image used in the article shows most countries with their capitals, and others with some random cities highlighted, truly to the T!

Or for the interested, TileMill would be better as you can print exports in PDF as vectors. I spent a great deal of time trying to manually create transit maps for one of our 'archaic' transit agencies, and this was before Mapbox Studio's time. I use Studio a bit, but TileMill does the better job as it caters better for offline usage.

I do agree with others though that it would have been a great amount of effort to invest in understanding CartoCSS for his requirements, and getting to create it.

Google does do a very good job at this for online maps - but as you can see in his photographs, it is absolutely the wrong choice for a wall. Having the ability to change the labelling of a map to suit your needs is cartography and the OpenStreetMap map making toolkit is one of the better ways of achieving this.

I'll be honest, I never really gave a lot of thought to whether or not I'm a "map lover" until this HN topic appeared in my feed, but your comment hooked me in...

...so much for this morning's priorities. /sigh

If you're familiar with the Natural Earth data set, do you know if it is possible to apply a transformation so a map could be printed of the World using the Cahill or Waterman projection?

I can envision a striking large-scale art piece that started from a "butterfly" representation of the World.

The data is stored as coordinates, so given software that supports a projection and understands the system used to store the data, it can be transformed.

(Much recently available data is stored using geographic coordinates - basically the latitude and longitude, and maybe the elevation, but a lot of older data, and especially government data, is stored in coordinate systems that are designed to limit the error in spatial analyses that are done on the data. This isn't really something that you would have to understand deeply to make a map in a given projection, but you might have to deal with it along the way.)

You can download QGIS and change the projection system pretty easily. It's also useful for doing other things like simplifying geometries, removing extra data columns, etc.

You should put your email address in your HN profile, so people can contact you. :-)

Your thought was my first thought too: but then I realized that Mapbox's products only support Web Mercator projection, which kinda ruins it for me :(

This is an amazing thread and comment. I've been looking to do a similar thing to the OP, and his much more thorough research confirms what I had found - none of the map sellers provide quite what I want, and I would have to resort to building it myself out of google maps (ideally using the API, not the web client).

Mapbox looks like exactly the thing I'm looking for (I want a local street-level map), thanks!

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