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@karlchick
... which buildings are important?
landuse=retail - does it have any effect for zl=10?  I mean - these areas are often quite small and the user cannot recognize them in zl=10

In my theme, important buildings are: cathedral, hospital, kindergarten, school, college, university, library, and townhall. 

But I would propose just subtracting one from each building's current zoom-appear values, this would then align with OAM maps.

Yes, you're right about landuse=retail at Z10, but having it visible a bit earlier like z12 or z13 would be sufficient. I just noticed that OAM have it set the same as residential and that's already at z10.

Attached is a comparison of LoMap vs OAM showing how the lack of buildings and retail areas make areas of a town centre start to feel empty in the LoMap map.

Reasonable suggestions. I just recently decided not to include residential streets into ZL12, but am still a bit undecided. Tertiary (and bigger) I agree. I start tertiary also in 11.

I saw your change to not show residential at z12 and liked it, I'm trying it out in my theme too, but did it slightly differently, at z12 I'm drawing the residential roads below the landuse=residential. This way any residential roads that exit a town/village and join another highway or on areas with no landuse set they are still visible/connected. Also I have an option to not fill landuse=residential and the the residential roads are still there. At z13 upwards I still draw them over the filled areas.

OK, it's changed...

Thanks, by the way I edited the post to add a few more suggestions.... you were quicker than I could edit the post ;-)

@karlchick
The highway=service and highway=unclassified will be available from ZL=12. What about the highway=track - is it necessary to show them from zl=12?

Yes please. This would be great, maybe useful of planning hiking routes, cycling/mtb routes and 4x4 green laners? But, I guess not as essential as the unclassified and service...

While we're at it, could we also have:

• tertiary visible from z11?
• place=town visible from z8? (Map goes suddenly blank at z8)
• place=locality from z15?
• buildings one zoom level earlier (i.e. important buildings from Z13, others from Z14)?
• landuse=retail from z10 (same as residential)?

These all also disappear rather prematurely...  actually a lot of the landuse tags disappear rather earlier than necessary.

I wonder if some if these settings carry over from v3 maps? With v4 maps being like one zoom level "closer" compared to v3 and with newer phones having much higher resolution screens i think this is becoming more noticeable now...

I noticed that the new PROW tags (designation) in LoMap are visible at Z12 (yay!), but not available in OAM, and in OAM the minor roads/tracks are visible at Z12 (yay!).

If I use overlays to merge OAM and LoMap I can sorta preview what making the minor roads visible from Z12 in LoMap would look like, attached... a best of both (but a bit slow to scroll)...

Lack of minor roads at Z12 looks even worse when using the screen zoom feature, see attached.

Note that "unclassified" highways are very common highway in the UK and are usually national speed limit roads (60mph), they just don't have road numbers. The very often connect villages together too.

Would it be possible to show highway.unclassified, highway.service and highway.track from level Z12?

Attached shows a comparison at Z12 of LoMap vs OAM, see that LoMap shows large blank areas. I think it better to show that there is something in the empty spaces... also, if you are navigating by car,  it would be good to see that there are some minor roads available and where they go,  especially when stuck in traffic jam and contemplating making a diversion...

One thing the consider is that quite a few paths exist but are not yet tagged with designation tag, and many paths in the UK are ancient rights of way that are not registered and may be lost. The UK government are trying to impose a deadline to get them registered or lost forever. Deadline was 2026, now moved to 2031. There is an online map of potential missing footpath...

If you'd like to get involved in saving unregistered PROW in the UK, here is the website about the topic which also provides a link to an online map of potentially missing PROW.

https://www.ramblers.org.uk/support-us/dont-lose-your-way

1. Do you think your colour coded menus ought to reflect the colours of Explorer/Landranger? (See my previous post)

2. I don't know how OS marks the boundaries of parks but in general for woods,
Explorer: line if fence etc, nothing if unfenced
Landranger: line if fence etc, dashed if unfenced (but varies)
OS-Style Explorer Landranger

3. Buildings appear to have rounded corners in your style OS-Style 

1. I did think of that and it's possible for 50k and 25k maps, but then what to do with the dynamic map which switches between them? Next I considered using different colour based on PROW waymarkers and cycle signs, so yellow for walkers, blue for cyclists, keep purple for mtb... not sure...

2. OS don't tend to mark park boundaries, but rather they use lines to indicate fences/barriers. This information is not present in the OSM data for woods and highways etc...

OS show dashes along the edge of unfenced roads, I guess this is useful to military personnel that might want to cross roads...

If OSM added fence attributes to woods, highways etc AND OAM/LoMap provided it then perhaps I could use it.... but I have  reused dashed highways to indicate unsealed highways, which would conflict then...

Very often woods and sealed highways are fenced, so this kinda makes sense...

3. Rounded corners will be due to the grow buildings option in 50k map. I added this to help merge buildings together in cities as 50k map doesn't show individual buildings in towns etc... if you untick it, it will revert to square buildings (I hope!)

I've downloaded their beta version as well and note their experimental VTM display does not work with your theme.  It used to blue screen completely until their last update, now if it can't load a theme it reverts back to a default theme.  The viewer does work with John Campbell's Voluntary theme.   

Thanks for the Thanks, I'm glad you like the theme, I initially made it for my own purpose, same reasons as you. I too am a software developer although mostly work on system architectures and defining our company's MBSE approach these days.

Have you tried the draft versions posted in earlier posts? I found an issue with case sensitive file names that caused issues.

Another potential issue might be some the svg files used for icons are not necessarily 100% compatible tiny svg format. Locusmap copes well usually. I'm using Inkscape to create them but sometimes have to manually tidy them up or change the point types...

I noticed that LM4 now rotates builtin symbols, but not there symbols. Would be a co feature if LM could rotate text and symbols on maps.

John, the black line under the bridleway is not black dashes, but the outline of a park, see attached.

It's just that the bridleway is followed/sharing the same ways points as the boundary of the park.

I'll have a look at if I want to outline parks or not...

Thanks twoten, perhaps you can provide coord for an example that I can check?

@john, thanks, clearly I didn't do a thorough enough check and only fixed one example... I will check again, sorry.

The black dashes are always drawn and then overdrawn by the PROW. I changed the size of the dashes, bur must have some black dashes in the old size somewhere...

[OS Map v20231203 Draft2.zip]

I've uploaded a copy of the theme with the colour icons added to the menus. Wondering if you find it an improvement or not. I'm going to try it out for a bit and then revert to no icons and see if I miss them.

    OS Map v20231203 Draft2.zip

No other changes since Draft1, but will appreciate any feedback on whether you think this is useful... Karl.

What happens if you don't group them?

Nothing, I just added the icons to the existing menu, I thought perhaps it might make it quicker to locate options in the list by colour.

Attached is a slight improvement? 

🟢 hiking options (25k PROW colour)
🟠 cycling options (25k circle colour)
🟣 mtb bike options (25k circle colour)
🟤 urban options (urban area colour)
⚪ road options
⚫ non-OS options
🔆 = highlight/emphasise options

Some of the footpaths that run alongside some minor roads are marked as a dotted line where they're not shown on the  Ordnance Survey maps. Is it possible to deselect these without affecting other public footpaths?

By dotted I suspect you mean thinner black dashes? These are footpaths that are classified as accessible to the public. But not defined (or assumed) as PROW.

In theory, according to the OSM tagging rules, you should be able to use these footpaths, but clearly you should observe local signage.

OS maps do show some of these as black dashes too, or very often as dashed tracks or indistinct dashed lines next to other boundary features.

It is possible to add a option "show non-PROW paths" if you wanted to untick it remove then. Not sure it's worth having... is there a particular reason to remove them? I'd hazard a guess at lots of urban pathways cluttering up the map?

One thing the consider is that quite a few paths exist but are not yet tagged with designation tag, and many paths in the UK are ancient rights of way that are not registered and may be lost. The UK government are trying to impose a deadline to get them registered or lost forever. Deadline was 2026, now moved to 2031. There is an online map of potential missing footpaths, can't find it at the moment..., but if a footpath is not registered but in regular use it could be registered as a PROW. Footpaths like this should/could exist in OSM as we are supposed to map what is visible on the ground... so rather than remove these from the map, how about checking if they are lost PROW and getting the registered?