Thanks for your responses. The way I see it there's no way someone without deep - and I mean very deep - knowledge of the inner workings of this app is ever going to be able to contribute. I mean because Locus uses mapsforge and mapsforge is documented very well, OpenAndroMaps was able to produce one of the best themes for mapsforge apps out there. And Locus did profit from this very much. The main reason I like Locus and OsmAnd is the offline maps. I don't like online raster maps. But if there's no good render theme that suits my needs, and I'm not able to customize the render theme - because there's no documentation - I'm but left to use Locus until there is a better render theme.
In my opinion render themes are one of the most important things of a maps app. There's this new blog post on https://osmand.net/blog "2021 New Year resolutions". It mentions many new features but nothing about documentation. That's a shame. I would think that investing in better documentation is worthwhile and time and money well spent. - Waldemar On Saturday, January 2, 2021 at 5:58:12 PM UTC+1 Waldemar Isbrecht wrote: > I was a long time Locus Map and OpenAndroMaps user and I really like the > OpenAndroMaps Elevate themes. > I've been using OsmAnd on and off for some time now and while there is no > OsmAnd render theme that comes even close to the OpenAndroMaps Elevate > theme I always settled for the Touring theme in OsmAnd. > > Some things I don't like about the Touring view for hiking (Alpine hiking > scale SAC active): > - colors for trail difficulty are way different from what I'm used to. > - trail_visibility is being ignored in Touring view although the default > renderer actually processes it. > > So I went down the rabbit hole to modify the > "Touring-view_(more-contrast-and-details).render.xml" theme with custom > additions. > > Alas, I didn't find a good and up to date documentation of the render > theme syntax. > The only place I found some help is: > https://osmand.net/help/docs/Custom_Rendering_How-To.htm > As far as I know the described syntax in that article is outdated. > There's no useful documentation as to how render files are processed. > The first thing I had to find out is how dependency is working. > "Touring-view_(more-contrast-and-details).render.xml" is dependent on > "default.render.xml". > The Next thing was that both files use different syntax. Some of this is > described in the "default.render.xml". > Then I needed to grasp where to add my modifications - I still don't get > how to add trail_visibility in touring view. > Then there are all the different attributes. Most of them not documented. > Just try to work out what "pathEffect_5" means? Or pathEffect_0 through > pathEffect_5 for that matter. > > Sure, with days of spare time I could reverse engineer most of what I need > by searching in the source code - and sometimes even this is not enough. > > Is there some place with detailed and up to date documentation for the > rendering theme files. If not, should I open an issue at the GitHub repo? > I think with better documentation more users could actually contribute to > OsmAnd rather than constantly asking for help and changes for some render > theme in the GitHub issues. > Proper documentation would empower more users to do the desired changes > themselves. I know I would benefit from better documentation and maybe even > contribute my changes to OsmAnd. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OsmAnd" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osmand/e528660d-e52b-4ff5-ba64-1e5fba244daan%40googlegroups.com.
