Let me just add a general note to this discussion. I continue to be interested in studying how to do better label rendering for elongated features such as certain seas (e.g. the Red Sea), gulfs (the Gulf of Bothnia or the Gulf of Aqaba), bays (Chesapeake Bay), peninsulas (Cape Cod), isthmuses, islands (Jura), countries (Norway, Sweden), lakes (Lake Michigan), channels (Skagerrak), sounds (Long Island Sound), straits (Queen Charlotte Strait), etc.
The idea would be to examine techniques like those presented in http://portal.survey.ntua.gr/main/courses/geoinfo/admcarto/lecture_notes/name_placement/bibliography/barrault_2001.pdf The figures of the paper (from about figure 10 on) show some of the sort of results that can be achieved. (It's unfortunate that the scan quality is so poor that the labels on the shaded areas are almost impossible to make out.) Those techniques absolutely require that the features to which they apply be represented as areas. I can certainly pilot the project on relatively noncontroversial area features such as the aforementioned countries, lakes and islands, but other area features will eventually require tackling both the technical difficulties in dealing with enormous areas and the political difficulties in dealing with areas for which part of the boundary is indefinite. I surely won't upload any controversial multipolygons at least until a pilot project is done, and I've no fixed time frame in which I plan to proceed. (So many projects, so little time!) But I think we can't afford to forget that high-quality labeling may eventually depend on resolving these questions. I know that there will continue to be a healthy controversy, but I remain confident that if there is a tangible benefit to be achieved from tagging indefinite objects, eventually the community will accept it as a necessary evil, and we'll work our way over the technical hurdles. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
