Hi all,
I appreciated being able to join my first Mappy Hour yesterday, though without mic/camera. I'm quite enamoured with this project and hope to fit in with the goals and the vibe. One thing we talked about, and I'd like to explore more formally, is how to deal with elevation in local units. I lead hikes in the local Santa Ana Mountains, and there is not a single person who hikes here, not even those from Europe or those who personally invented the metric system, who thinks of peak elevations in meters. The guides and the maps are all in feet, the surveying markers are in feet, as are the topo maps. This is just a fact of life even if we all [including me] agree that Americans are foolish for not adopting the metric system. An obvious thought is to enter the elevation including the units, so Sierra Peak would show as "3045 feet" rather than "928", but this won't work. The wiki page for the "ele" key defines the tag as meters, so it's reasonable to expect that some software out there relies on this, and it would have no provisions to convert anything on the fly because it ought to expect numeric meters. But even with this aside, that still doesn't solve the rendering problem: I believe that page tiles are rendered as images, so it's got to pick *something* for the text, and I don't think there's any way of having a user preference to show these things in local units. My suspicion is that there is no easy fix here, but I think a discussion is in order. I've added a section to the key:ele page that touches on this, not so much to propose a solution, but to let others with this same issue know that it's seen as an issue. Ref: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ele#Local_Units Is this kind of thing suitable for the key:ele page? Steve --- Stephen J Friedl | Security Consultant | UNIX Wizard | 714 345-4571 <mailto:st...@unixwiz.net> st...@unixwiz.net | Southern California | Windows Guy | unixwiz.net
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