Text "Great Britain" appears in centre of screen in Scotland vector map

[Fred Flintstone]

OSMAnd+ V2.4.6 with "United Kingdom Scotland" vector file V 1 Sep 2016.

It looks like this is a problem in the vector file. Most likely someone has added "Great Britain" to the OSM data as a region although I can't find it. The problem is that OSMAnd renders "Great Britain" slap bang in the middle of the screen all the time from zoom 13+.

[Poutnik]

It may be Brexit related... :-)

Like a joke war between English and Scottish OSM contributors.

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[Andy Townsend]

On 07/09/2016 10:17, Fred Flintstone wrote:
>
> It looks like this is a problem in the vector file. Most likely
> someone has added "Great Britain" to the OSM data as a region although
> I can't find it. The problem is that OSMAnd renders "Great Britain"
> slap bang in the middle of the screen all the time from zoom 13+.

I haven't noticed that particular problem (I'm not a regular OsmAnd
user) but for info someone did add a "place=island" for Great Britain
relatively recently (apparently initially as an "invalid" multipolygon,
which was later "fixed").

http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/6038068

("api" rather "browse" link provided because it is too much data for the
browse pages to handle)

See
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/49058/rendering-of-lakes-on-garmin-devices
and the links from there, including to
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2016-August/thread.html#19100
(discussion on the OSM talk-gb list).

It may make sense for OsmAnd to explicitly exclude the relation if it is
causing particular problems.

Best Regards,

Andy

[Fred Flintstone]

Thanks for that. I don't see any compelling reason why the whole of the UK should not have a place=island tag.

I think this is more an OSMAnd rendering problem. There needs to be some better criteria for when a multipolygon's name should be rendered. For example, only when opposite edges are both visible on the screen.

[Roger James]

It also appears on England regional maps as well. It is not the text content that is really annoying. It the fact that it is rendered near to or exactly in the centre of screen. So the more you zoom in the more it often obscures what you want to look at. Don't blame the data, let the politicians argue about that. Blame the renderer for rendering the tagging info for a huge(in area) polygon at high zoom levels.

Just for a laugh I might introduce a European Economic Community polygon and let that obscure Great Britain!

But joking aside it is really annoying and needs fixing.

Roger

[P Wat]

It definitely appears on England South East. It started happening recently.
I agree it is annoying, and it is also unnecessary.
Please can it be fixed.
PW

[P Wat]

[nickjoh...@gmail.com]

I've opened an issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/3074

Nick

[Harry van der Wolf]

I did not want to mix in as up till now it was just about annoyance about the fact that Great Britain appeared.

I don't think it is an OsmAnd error though but a tag connected to Great Britain, consisting of England, Scotland and Wales. It appears in all.

But it is the same for Magic Earth where Great Britain also occurs in the latest maps of those 3 countries..

Harry

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[pshrutpark]

I have experienced the same problem for some time. I always know which country or island I'm on and don't need to be reminded!

The label obscures map detail and I wish it could be removed or turned off.

Cheers 

[Roger James]

I have just looked at the data for the Great Britain case. The "place=island" tag has been applied to a multipolygon relation. According to the OSM wiki this is specifically not allowed! So a strong case for removing this tag could be made. However I do not think this invalidates the bug that has been raised. It looks like this specific tagging is wrong. But if the place tag was moved to the coastline polygon object this would be OK. It would be interesting to see if this was rendered more sensibly (we do not see country names rendered at high zoom levels).

Does anyone feel brave enough to make this edit. I don't!

Roger

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[pshrutpark]

More widespread than just GB.

The problem I referred to above related to the South Island of New Zealand. "South Island" is displayed centre screen. Interestingly the North Island doesn't have the same problem.

Regards

On Wednesday, 14 September 2016 12:18:30 UTC+12, Roger James wrote:

I have just looked at the data for the Great Britain case. The "place=island" tag has been applied to a multipolygon relation. According to the OSM wiki this is specifically not allowed! So a strong case for removing this tag could be made. However I do not think this invalidates the bug that has been raised. It looks like this specific tagging is wrong. But if the place tag was moved to the coastline polygon object this would be OK. It would be interesting to see if this was rendered more sensibly (we do not see country names rendered at high zoom levels).

Does anyone feel brave enough to make this edit. I don't!

Roger

On 13 September 2016 9:33:39 pm Harry van der Wolf <hvd...@gmail.com> wrote:

I did not want to mix in as up till now it was just about annoyance about the fact that Great Britain appeared.

I don't think it is an OsmAnd error though but a tag connected to Great Britain, consisting of England, Scotland and Wales. It appears in all.

But it is the same for Magic Earth where Great Britain also occurs in the latest maps of those 3 countries..

Harry

2016-09-13 18:39 GMT+02:00 <nickjoh...@gmail.com>:

I've opened an issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/3074

Nick

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[Roger James]

I got it wrong in my last post. Further down the wiki page on "place=island" there is a section on "large islands" that  contradicts the information given at the top. It says that large islands (coastlines with over 4000 nodes) should be mapped with multipolygons. So the data is correct. Please do not change it.

However I hope this means that a place=island tag on a multipolygon relation can be used to detect a large island. In this case it should be a fairly simple fix in the osmand rendering XML to handle this as a special case.

Roger

[Roger James]

Harry,

This issue will appear wherever an "island" tag is used. Whether it is on a multiple or a single polygon.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in most of the renderers that "islands" are small and should be rendered at the higher zoom levels.

However islands such as Great Britain are large, so it is not appropriate to render tagging data from them at higher zoom levels.

Here is a list of the largest islands in the world.

Greenland 2,175,597 sq km.
New Guinea 800,311
Borneo 744,108
Madagascar 587,931
Baffin 507,451
Sumatra 473,605
Honshu 230,966
Great Britain 229,979

If someone were to add an island tag to any of these as well as Great Britain then that tag would also be perfectly valid. But then the Osmand renderer (and I suspect most others) would render the name of the "island" at high zoom levels, potentially obscuring more relevant data.

That is what most people(including me) are bitching about. Not the data.

Roger

On 13 September 2016 9:33:39 pm Harry van der Wolf <hvd...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Harry van der Wolf]

Hi Roger,

I fully agrree with you that it is annoying.

I reacted when it was posted earlier in this thread  as an OsmAnd error in the issue list, but that is not correct.

If I was not clear (enough) about that I'm sorry.

It being such an annoyance one might want to adapt OsmAnd to "falsely" correct for it to get rid of it, but that would be a feature request.

Harry

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[Roger James]

Hi,

Great Britain has reappeared on my maps. I had put in a custom rendering XML which had stopped it appearing. That has ceased working. However the text has moved off centre, so it is not quite as annoying. I presume a recent update of osmand has done this. It is a pity though that it has stopped the custom rendering working, as I would rather not see it at all.

Roger

[P Wat]

Please add me to the list of people who would rather not see it. It is irritating and irrelevant.  Paul W

[Jack Burke]

I haven't looked at the problem in OSM myself, but is it possible that someone (incorrectly) added Northern Ireland* to a Great Britain multipolygon recently? I could see that causing the problem.

-Jack

*If I have the legalities right in my head, a multipolygon containing the place=island of Great Britain and the border of Northern Ireland could be correctly included in a multipolygon named United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, though.

[P Wat]

There is more :(
When looking at say the Isle of Wight (a large island close to the south coast of England, near Southampton) you see text "Isle of Wight" obscuring the detail at zoom level 0.25 miles down to Zoom level 2 yd.  Who needs it?  If we must have it, why not at Zoom levels more like 5 miles or 10 miles?   It is not currently visible there, but could be useful! (IMHO)
Paul W

[Roger James]

The Great Britain multipolygon relation with the place=island tag does not include any Northern Island coastline ways.

The problem here is a classic cartographical one. How do you render information relating to a physically large geographical area without obscuring information relating to smaller areas or points. Thus is hugely complex in the modern world of computer generated zoomable maps. In the case we are looking at the decision on whether on to render the text probably needs to be based on the size of the geographical are that it relates to, this is computationally intensive. The Great Britain multipolygon has many thousands of points. The decision on where to render the text is even more difficult. The latest version of Osmand will render island names at level 16 and higher. Unfortunately they will sometimes obscure detail at higher rendering levels.

One possible approach might be something like a hectare(age) tag on a relationship. The current renderer could use this as input.

R.

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[Harry van der Wolf]

It has to do with this tag in the default.render.xml: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/rendering_styles/default.render.xml#L4615

or copied here: <case minzoom="11" maxzoom="16" tag="place" value="island" nameTag="" textSize="14" textOrder="113"/>

Because Great Britain is tagged as an island, that line becomes active in relatively high zoomlevels 11-16. For small islands that is exactly what you want. For Great-Britain it is a nuisance.

An option could be to lower the textOrder importance (= a higher value). so something like:

<case minzoom="11" maxzoom="16" tag="place" value="island" nameTag="" textSize="14" textOrder="213"/>

But that would also reflect on small islands and would need some tweaking and trying out.

Harry

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[Harry van der Wolf]

And maybe one could play with the <renderingAttribute name="polygonMinSizeToDisplay">

I'm not sure whether this is possible currently but if so we could make a switch where the polygon size is connected to the island tag.

But in that case we need to determine the size of the Great-Britain polygon and take 50% (or another number?) for the if-then display statement for "small" islands.

I guess this requires a feature request as I'm afraid it is currently not possible.But I only gave it a quick look and didn't work on renders for more than 1½ years now.

And maybe we have clever people aboard who can think of an elegant solution with the current possibilities.

Anyone desperate enough to file this as an issue/feature request?  https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues

[Roger James]

There is some discussion about this at  https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/3074

That issue is now closed by the fix at https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/commit/722f0d24731626dce902327e8fa815587cb521e3

I had made my own temporary fix according to the help given in the discussion. But this seems to have stopped working with the latest version of osmand.

Can anyone try my custom render file and see if it works for them.

Here are the contents

<renderingStyle name="IslandKiller" depends="default" defaultColor="#f1eae4" version="1">
<text>
   <case tag="place" value="island" disable="true"/>
</text>
</renderingStyle>

I would like to know if my tinkering with it has broken it, but I do not remember doing any!

Roger

[A Thompson]

On Wednesday, October 5, 2016 at 11:12:41 AM UTC+1, Roger James wrote:

Can anyone try my custom render file and see if it works for them.

Testing in Osmand 2.5.2 this doesn't work for me. However, I've added the same code to a renderer I offered in another thread,  and it does then have the desired effect: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/osmand/mC6e37AHSGU 

I have no idea what's going on. Almost everything I have tried for custom renderers has not worked when I thought it should!

[Roger James]

> --

Hi,

The Great Britain text has disappeared again in the last few weeks. I am using Osmand+ version 2.5.1; at least that's what it says it is! Where are you getting 2.5.2 from? I have some vague recollection of beta releases somewhere.

I don't know if the reappearance is due to my renderer working or another patch of the source. This custom rendering stuff is a black art. I cannot make sense of the documentation or the source code!

Roger

[Roger James]

I took my custom renderer out and the text did not reappear. However the coastline that I tested it near no longer appears to be in the "Great Britain" relation. I wonder if this only shows up when you are near coastlines that are still in the relation.

Honest Guv, but is was not me who removed it?😀

Roger

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[A Thompson]

Thanks Roger,  OsmAnd 2.5.2 is the version that has appeared on Google Play in the last few days. I think it jumped all the way from 2.4.7.

With the standard OsmAnd or "Touring view" renderers, The "Great Britain" text still appears as I scroll around East Sussex, though it's not as intrusive as it was at first. It can still obscure details annoyingly, though.

I have a different problem writing custom renderers: I think I *do* understand how to do it (more based on the examples of the renderers supplied in the OsmAnd package than by reading the documentation). But most things I try just give "Exception occurred: renderer was not loaded." This is what happens with your IslandKiller renderer on my phone at the moment. As I said, exactly the same fragment of code embedded in my custom renderer does suppress "Great Britain" without giving an error on loading. I only got my renderer to work in the first place by a huge amount of trial and error. Maybe if we were running OsmAnd in a development environment there would be better information to understand failures. Otherwise it's like shooting in the dark!

[nickjoh...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, 12 November 2016 17:13:55 UTC, A Thompson wrote:

But most things I try just give "Exception occurred: renderer was not loaded."

Just in case anyone is interested, I've figured out that this error appears if your custom rendering filename contains either dashes or underscores.

In other words, test_test.render.xml would not work, but testtest.render.xml is fine.

I've submitted a pull request for the fix--you can read the full explanation there if you're interested:
https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/pull/3296
 
Thanks
Nick

[A Thompson]

Thank you Nick! That's very helpful and explains why my renderer with underscores in its filename stopped working after a recent update, and was fixed by renaming the file.

It doesn't explain why I was getting that same error toast message with Roger's renderer named "IslandKiller.render.xml" above, and you inspired me to get to the bottom of it:

• Conclusion: The IslandKiller renderer does work with the current release of OsmAnd, which otherwise still shows "Great Britain" annoyingly. But if one makes a renderer file by copy and paste from a web page, it's possible to insert non-displaying characters that mess-up the reading of the file.
• Details: Entirely on my phone, I copied the renderer above to the clipboard from the Opera browser. Then using ES File Explorer I created a new file in OsmAnd's rendering folder, renamed it appropriately, opened it for editing in ES Note Editor, pasted in the text from the clipboard, and saved the file. The text looked to be correct, but the renderer won't load. But by other means I could create a file that appeared identical and yet worked! Inspecting the failing file with a binary/hex viewer I discovered a few special characters that weren't being displayed. For example, after the opening "<" are extra characters 0xEF, 0xBB and 0xBF before it continues correctly with "renderingstyle..." The extra characters aren't displayed at all in ES Note Editor, but they aren't white-space so it's not surprising that they thwarted OsmAnd from reading the .xml. I expect things would be different with other editors and operating systems, but if anyone else has inexplicable problems with renderers taken from websites by copy-and-paste (even partly), then be warned!

[Lynn Deffenbaugh]

0xEF 0xBB 0xBF is a UTF-8 Byte Order Marker.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

[Roger James]

On 6 December 2016 2:29:40 pm Lynn Deffenbaugh <ldef...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF is a UTF-8 Byte Order Marker.
>  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
>
> On Monday, December 5, 2016 at 6:11:13 PM UTC-5, A Thompson wrote:
>>
>> Thank you Nick! That's very helpful and explains why my renderer with
>> underscores in its filename stopped working after a recent update, and was
>> fixed by renaming the file.
>>
>> It doesn't explain why I was getting that same error toast message with
>> Roger's renderer named "IslandKiller.render.xml" above, and you inspired me
>> to get to the bottom of it:
>>

>>    - *Conclusion*: The IslandKiller renderer *does *work with the current

>>    release of OsmAnd, which otherwise still shows "Great Britain" annoyingly.
>>    But if one makes a renderer file by copy and paste from a web page, it's
>>    possible to insert non-displaying characters that mess-up the reading of
>>    the file.

>>    - *Details*: Entirely on my phone, I copied the renderer above to the

>>    clipboard from the Opera browser. Then using ES File Explorer I created a
>>    new file in OsmAnd's rendering folder, renamed it appropriately, opened it
>>    for editing in ES Note Editor, pasted in the text from the clipboard, and
>>    saved the file. The text looked to be correct, but the renderer won't load.
>>    But by other means I could create a file that appeared identical and yet
>>    worked! Inspecting the failing file with a binary/hex viewer I discovered a
>>    few special characters that weren't being displayed. For example, after the
>>    opening "<" are extra characters 0xEF, 0xBB and 0xBF before it continues
>>    correctly with "renderingstyle..." The extra characters aren't displayed at
>>    all in ES Note Editor, but they aren't white-space so it's not surprising
>>    that they thwarted OsmAnd from reading the .xml. I expect things would be
>>    different with other editors and operating systems, but if anyone else has
>>    inexplicable problems with renderers taken from websites by copy-and-paste
>>    (even partly), then be warned!
>>
>>
>

Oops, my bad. I checked the file on my system. At least one of the copies had the utf-8 BOM in it. I probably posted that one. I think I probably opened it in an XML editor that 'corrected' it by putting the utf-8 marker in it. All my Linux systems are set to utf-8 by default. As most 'full' XML parser handle utf-8 I suspect osmand is using a cut down inbuilt parser.

I wonder if putting a real XML header on the fragment would work ;-)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

I have come across this problem before with XML 'like' config files.

Roger