
Free OpenStreetMap tile library: watercolor, black and white, terrain - DoreenMichele
http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782
======
toastal
I try to contribute to OSM whenever I get the chance from my smartphone. I
like that others do too; often times it'll give me walking directions through
a mall or whatever sometimes shaving 10 minutes off. It's only as good as it's
users though, so I encourage more to contribute.

~~~
maire
Sadly these maps still have our driveway as a "road."

Years ago I heard that Apple was going to use OSM data for their map app. I
contacted OSM to remove our driveway. They did demote our driveway to a
"private road" (the best I could do). Luckily, our driveway is not in the
Apple maps app. I am still somewhat irritated particularly when I see our
driveway in apps like this.

~~~
mytdi
I am an OSM contributor and could try to fix it for you, if you give me the
location. My email address is in my profile.

~~~
maire
Thank you for your kind offer to fix my driveway. I just sent you an email.

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aax
None can surpass the Spinal Map tile library
[https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/spinal-
map/](https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/spinal-map/)

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
There's a few Easter eggs in the place labels that are worth seeking out...

~~~
gravitystorm
"Atlantic City of Rock" is one of my favourites, but there are more!

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Gravityloss
Why do many online maps like Google have so little contrast? It's very
different to printed maps over here. You basically have a really hard time
seeing the white roads on the light grey background, especially when looking
at the display from some angle.

~~~
Symbiote
Google Maps is now a business directory with a map interface.

The highest contrast is reserved for business that are paying Google for
advertisements, followed by other shops, hotels, restaurants and bars.

Everything else, but especially roads and railways, are desaturated into mush.

Compare Streetmap UK[1], which was the first popular online mapping service
for the UK in 1997. The web design has hardly changed, and up to the linked
zoom level they're still showing the standard (government-produced Ordnance
Survey) "paper" maps.

[1]
[https://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=531405&y=181525&z=115](https://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=531405&y=181525&z=115)

~~~
KarlKemp
I'm somewhat sure that the low contrast predates advertisement on maps by
several years. I also doubt Google would willingly compromise Maps's usability
for the sake of advertising, especially right from the start where there is
enough low-hanging fruit and revenue is bound to be negligible. That would be
like plastering ads over the google.com homepage, something they continue to
resist two decades in.

My money is on either a wish to make (all kinds of) labels stand out, or just
aesthetic preferences. FWIW I always found OSM to have too much contrast (and
too much details), and the emergence of all these services rebranding OSM in
different styles would seem to be evidence for other people also considering
OSM's default style to leave room for improvement.

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edent
Sadly, these tiles haven't been updated for several years. They are beautiful
though. Probably best used for zoomed out maps.

~~~
pininja
Does anyone here know about the process of updating a tile set?

~~~
chillydawg
Unless you need to do that, I wouldn't suggest trying. It's a nightmare with
several sets of contradictory, overlapping out of date docs needed to do the
whole thing properly. Then of course it breaks and you don't know why. It used
to be that tilemill kinda nailed it but that just went away.

~~~
rangibaby
Tileoven was the working fork for awhile but it seems plain Tilemill is back

~~~
mtmail
I know some people moved to
[https://github.com/kosmtik/kosmtik](https://github.com/kosmtik/kosmtik) after
tilemill stopped being developed.

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nknealk
For those interested, carto also has some lovely OSM tiles

[https://carto.com/blog/positron-dark-matter-new-
look/](https://carto.com/blog/positron-dark-matter-new-look/)

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diminish
OpenStreetMap is one of the greatest open source initiatives out there.

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dang
A thread from 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736247).

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ron0c
Thunderforest has a free tier that has served my hobby projects for years.
[https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/](https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/)

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willvarfar
The tile set I've been unable to find is an overlay of all roads, suitable for
drawing on top of satellite and terrain maps. Are there any? There aren't any
listed on
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_servers](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_servers)

~~~
lukeqsee
If you use vector tiles, you can use any of the major providers:

\- Mapbox ([https://mapbox.com](https://mapbox.com))

\- MapTiler ([https://maptiler.com](https://maptiler.com))

\- Stadia Maps ([https://stadiamaps.com](https://stadiamaps.com))

\-
[https://switch2osm.github.io/providers/](https://switch2osm.github.io/providers/)

…then you style / display only the road data and exclude the rest of the data
and overlay that on your tiles.

(Note: I'm co-founder of Stadia Maps.)

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jokoon
I would be curious to see how much memory would be saved if those tiles would
use 1bit black and white.

I just tried saving one of those shade-of-grey "Toner" tile to "4 grey" in
xnview, which I guess is a 2bit PNG, meaning it would use 4 shades of grey, so
black, white, #555 and #AAA.

The tile went from 32kb to 6kb, so a 80% size reduction.

I'm really curious if this would allow one to store a country region with
tiles on a smartphone. OSMand lets you download vector maps to browser them
offline, but rendering can be a little slow on some phones.

EDIT: OSM tiles use a 256 colors palette, most tiles less than 10kb. I guess
there are tools out there to generate a 8, 16 or 32 colors palette. XNView
seems to use libimagequant to generate a palette.

~~~
NelsonMinar
The current state of the art for small tilesets is to store vector data in
tiles on the device, then render to raster there. It's way, way smaller than
any realistic raster image.

~~~
jokoon
sure but it's also slower to render

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AlexTrask
I love the watercolor map. I seareched how they do this but I don't understand
how they do it

~~~
lgeorget
The sources are here:
[https://github.com/stamen/watercolor](https://github.com/stamen/watercolor).
You can import the project into Tilemill ([https://github.com/tilemill-
project/tilemill](https://github.com/tilemill-project/tilemill)).

~~~
almccon
Hi. I work for Stamen. We have a very old blog post that goes into more detail
about how we made these tiles: [https://hi.stamen.com/watercolor-
process-3dd5135861fe](https://hi.stamen.com/watercolor-process-3dd5135861fe)

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nearmuse
Could someone lend a hand and tell me where can I find OSM Carto tiles legend?
As in colors for different tag combinations? I am trying to build something
that requires a custom legend.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Out of interest, do non-British English readers understand "Map key" as a
synonym for "Legend"? I've always called it a "key" (as a British English
speaker) but Americans often don't seem to understand this.

~~~
pwg
American here, I've heard both "Map Key" (or just key) and "Legend" used
interchangeably for map Keys/Legends for as long as I can recall. So I suppose
there's more to it than just American vs. British English.

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ct520
Sweet! My first thoughts when I seen this.
[https://community.glowforge.com/t/1871-denver-map-on-
granite...](https://community.glowforge.com/t/1871-denver-map-on-
granite/37818)

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iicc
Anyone else notice that when you update OSM, Google maps miraculously updates
too?

~~~
rmc
Er, no. Do you have evidence that Google Maps is copying data from
OpenStreetMap? Because if you do, please document it. It would be a
_bombshell_.

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swiley
What tools do people like for generating tiles themselves?

I found one powerful one that I liked quite a bit, but it was primarily
written for generating sea charts and never put labels on open polylines.

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MaxBarraclough
I really like the Toner style. Simple, and high-contrast.

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chriswelder73
US is hell now

