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FYI: Here is an example of unsealed trunk and classified roads in Botswana (both are listed as compacted surface), see attached, rendered with the new road surfaces/grades option I'm working on.

I checked on google maps and OSM data base.... all these roads in the map view are actually compacted earth, including the unclassified road shown as sealed. But this is because the map data does not define any surface/grade for it... so the rendered view (as always) is only as good as the data in the map...

Hi Karl, I notice your theme doesn't distinguish between sealed & unsealed roads. Unfortunately very few Locus themes do, which seems odd as you'd think cyclists would be quite interested in the road surface. Bernard's Desert theme (www.maiwolf.de) is the best for this - his on LHS compared to yours on RHS. Voluntary is the only other one that shows any difference but it is very hard to discern.

for example in my screen cap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=16/-42.5113/147.6427
compares surface=unpaved with surface=Asphalt

Hi Andrew,

Attached is a sneaky peek at the road surfaces/grades overlay option I have prototyped for the OS Map theme.
   - 1st image is the default OS map view
   - 2nd image is road surfaces/grades enabled
   - 3rd image is with the emphasise road surfaces/grades enables too

With the road surfaces/grades option selected, if the road is unsealed it will have a dashed casing and the core will have a texture applied based on the type of surface.

The second attachement shows the current road surface/grades renderings and highlight colours.

It is still very much work in progress. I have to say that I have not yet found a real life example of surface="winter"...

I originally introduced the left/right driving option initially to place OS road labels (which are dy offset pathtext) on the outside of dual carriage ways. The labels appear on the  passenger side of the road in dual carriage ways. It also has an impact for cycle lanes. The other use of left/right driving is the choice of post box symbol, uk vs continental...

@karlchick on a PC screen the textures are subtle, so in my opinion will be quite hard to distinguish on a smaller Android screen. The "peck marks" used by John with the Voluntary theme are also too subtle (for me). I modified Bernard's Desert theme XML to make unsealed more evident; that is the great thing about XML compared to a binary format.

I've prototyped the road surface textures in the OS map theme and do find it a bit too subtle at low zooms... I am trying different colours and textures and transparency to make them easier to see and differentiate.

At higher zooms it works very well. I am thinking of adding a emphasise road surfaces/grades option to allow easier route planning at low zooms... probably colour coded to the quality of the road surface somehow.

BTW, I am implementing surface textures for cycleways, tracks and all roads except motorways. I have found a few examples of unclassified roads that are compacted/grade2/grade3... might make these into tracks...

I'm thinking about using some transparent PNG surface textures to overlay the road cores for "surface" and "tracktype", see attached (mock up in powerpoint).

Wondering what you think of this idea?

Hi Andrew,

Road Surface is something I have been thinking about a lot. What I haven't figured out is how to represent the road surfaces in a way that doesn't distract from the Ordinance Survey look and feel.

I want to implement something though... probably as an overlay option so OS purests can revert to OS map look/feel.  Perhaps there is a way to apply patterns/PNGs to the road cores...

I'm also wondering if the grade1/2/3/4/5 of tracks needs to be represented somehow too... I know John introduced varying lengths of peck/dash to the casings...

New release now available v20210210.

I have updated the first post with the latest release notes and links. I'm now using google drive to release the theme in a shared folder that contains all the releases and the PDF legends.

Mainly improvements are made for:

• Added new/missing elements: customer/private parking, forest cutlines, ditch barriers, earth banks, gullies, hedges, military bunkers, post boxes, public artworks, town halls
• Major improvement to rendering of all waterways (using casings/cores now)
• Made visible some elements that got hidden by water areas: piers, tidal-flats
• Added option to highlight cycle lanes/tracks - useful if you want to plan cycle routes using them

Many other small changes/fixed, see release notes for details.

Note that post boxes have alternative renderings based on if you set "drive on the left side" or "drive on the right side" overlay options:

• left side = red circles as most left hand side driving countries use round red post boxes.
• right side = yellow squares as most right hand side driving countries use square yellow post boxes.

NB: Remember that the default overlay options in the theme are set to hide non-OS symbols and road furniture. You'll need to switch these on to see them.

"Dark color mode" for the map just invert map colors, nothing more. What you need is a directly created "Night vector map theme". Not sure if such a theme exists ...

My "OS Map" theme provides both day and night themes. It supports LoMap and both v3 and v4 OAM vector map formats. Link to theme post:

https://forum.locusmap.eu/index.php?topic=7000.0

Woo hoo! I love the improvements for dark mode. Now totally usable at night.

I agree the buttons are probably too black now though. Is it possible to use an alpha setting to match the rest of the GUI?

If the intention is to make the the buttons stand out against the bottom bar, perhaps a lighter or different colour (eg red-ish) or less/more alpha...

But thank you again for the dark map background!

I just tried out the Dark Mode feature of LM4 as this is the main feature of interest for me, as LM3 is useless for night time walking.

It is a big improvement having dark menus etc. But there are still a couple of annoying things that make it less useful for night use:
    1 - The zoom control and centre on location buttons are very bright white (see first attachment)
            - would be good to have these darker in dark mode, or customisable in the expert settings perhaps...
            - I like to always have this on display, in the LM3 they were dark and part of the lower button bar (see third attachement).
    2 - When you zoom out the background colour of the undrawn map area is very bright (see second attachment)

As is currently stands LM4 is not providing me with a usable dark mode.
If fixable, this would be a feature that might convince me to move to LM4 subscription model later, otherwise I am very happy with LM3 (I don't need the online/cloud capabilities, just static off-line maps with route planning...)

As you said, it needs to be split out to separate rules, something like this:

<rule e="way" k="landuse" v="allotments|meadow|grass|orchard|vineyard">
  <area fill="#DDE8BB" />
</rule>
<rule e="way" k="landuse" v="allotments|orchard|vineyard">
  <area stroke="#C2D881" stroke-width="0.5" />
</rule>
<rule e="way" k="landuse" v="orchard" zoom-min="14">
  <area symbol-scaling="size" src="file:/patterns/Landuse-Orchard.png" />
</rule>
<rule e="way" k="landuse" v="vineyard" zoom-min="14">
  <area symbol-scaling="size" src="file:/patterns/Landuse-Vineyard.png" />
</rule>


The original rules would have worked in the v3 'engine' but in 'v4' the implementation is different and has this weird behaviour.

Hi,

I've attached a copy of "renderTheme-reference.xlsx" which I found referred to by other posts and lists the syntax and values that LM seems to support.

Your observation about line symbol centering matches the definition in the reference.

Hope that helps, not sure where the original/master working copy is kept/maintained...

best regards,
Karl.

New release now available v20210103.

i have updated the first post with the latest release notes and links. I'm now using google drive to release the theme in a shared folder that contains all the releases and the PDF legends.

Mainly improvements are made for:

• Improved hiking route emphasis/highlights, using green for iwn/nwn/rwn and yelllow for lwn/uwn
• Improved cycling route emphasis/highlights, using red for icn/ncn and blue for rcn/lcn/ucn
• Added cycle lanes and cycle tracks

Route emphasizes/highlights are visible from zoom level 7 (depending on when/what the map shows) and include a colour coded route label too. From zoom level 15 routes are as in previous version of the theme.

Attached are screenshots showing examples of new cycle lanes/tracks and improved route emphasizes/highlights.

The colours are picked to match the route labels used already. I decided the keep national walking routes with green and use yellow highlight for local walking routes.

Note, in the third screenshot you can see that, at low zoom levels, the ncn/nwn routes get a fainter highlight than icn/iwn so you can more easily pick out the international hiking/cycle network routes.

Hey, in the OS Map Day, there is a lot of FM - what is it, can we get rid of it?

Hi Tapio, as John replied, the FM is the OS map symbol/abbreviation used to denote a Farm. There are many other abbreviations used on the OS map to denote many different things. They are all listed in the OS MAp Day Legend.pdf linked in the first post:

   OS Map Day Legend

Attached is a screenshot of the abbreviation section.

So in answer to the question, no I don't think we should remove the Fm's (or the other abbreviations) as they are part of the OS map format.

If you really wanted to remove any of the maps symbols, then you could replace the corresponding SVG file with an empty SVG file I suppose, this would make them invisible on the displayed map theme then...

I believe this is the tag mapping file used for the LoMap v3 maps:

https://github.com/asamm/mapsforge-v3-modded/blob/master/various/tag-mapping-xml/tag-mapping-tourist.xml

I'm not 100% sure if this is the latest, perhaps @voldapet can advise/correct...