On 09/05/11 11:44, ael wrote: > I have been encouraging a friend to use OSM. He has just mailed in > puzzlement after trying to find an OS grid reference (presumably > looking at mapnik).
What do you mean by "find" exactly? Do you mean that he typed it into the search box on http://www.openstreetmap.org/ and was distressed not to get a response? > I saw > http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/2056/using-the-ordnance-survey-national-grid-with-openstreetmap > but just converting a single grid reference to a good approximation to > (lat,long) isn't *that* difficult, surely? My Garmin does it a less than > a ms or so with very low computing power. Does anything in that thread say it is hard? I don't think it does. Note that the thread is actually talking about overlaying the grid rather than just searching for a reference, which is somewhat harder and would produce what might be a somewhat unexpected result in that the grid squares wouldn't actually appear to be square. On top of that overlaying the grid is not something that we would ever be likely to do on the main site because it a very country specific thing and the map there is a worldwide one. Making search work is a whole different issue and I would certainly consider reasonable patches to do that - there are complicated issues of OS intellectual property (which I'm not sure Richard's answer on that thread accurately addresses) which would need to be considered depending on what algorithm was used. Tom -- Tom Hughes ([email protected]) http://compton.nu/ _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
