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Comment by natural219 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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