Update to mapsforge library 0.12.0

[fzk]

Mapsforge library version 0.12.0 has significant improvements concerning street labels. See attached screenshot.

[john_percy]

Now done in latest beta. Well done, Menion and team! Street names look really good.

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[menion]

Perfect. Definitely not work on my side ... I just updated one number in config file. Glory belongs to mapsForge developers .

[Andrew Heard]

Glory belongs to mapsForge developers .

and so say all of us
thanks mapsForge developers

[Viajero Perdido]

This is indeed a big improvement - congrats to all involved!

There's still a wish-list, though.  (Isn't that always the case?)  A few items come to mind:

• Trails often turn sharp corners, and text suffers when bent sharply.  I wonder if there's a way to avoid rendering text around sharper corners somehow...
• Text looks to be rendered with a very thin white border (1px?) around the letters.  Barely noticeable without magnification.  I'm thinking a slightly thicker border might be more readable.
  
• And...  (unrelated to the latest change).  Divided highways often render the same name twice, once for each direction, overlapping and thus barely readable.  If the code has collision-testing logic (does it?), it could check to see if the two colliding texts are identical, and if so, could render it just once at the midpoint between them.

I'm tempted to pull down the MF code and see if I can't get involved personally on this.  But in reality, that'd have to wait a while, and for all I know, the MF developers may already have a solution for some or all of this. 

Anyway, that's my dream list.  Thanks for reading.

[lor74cas]

Graphically the names of the streets are now pleasant, but in practice they are not very so useful. The text is written in too small characters, at least on my device. Sometimes it is just illegible as it is small, I imagine myself outdoors in the hurry to find the correct information I don't think is very user friendly.
The text size is dependent on the zoom level and the width of the road. The street name should have a minimum size in order to be displayed (maybe even protruding from the road limits), the current one is too small or must be dependent on the screen resolution / size.

[john_percy]

@lor74cas @Viajero Perdido
Some of the issues you describe relate to the theme in use rather than the underlying rendering engine. What theme(s) are you using? I'm updating my Voluntary theme to make it work better with the new Locus versions.


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[lor74cas]

@lor74cas @Viajero Perdido
Some of the issues you describe relate to the theme in use rather than the underlying rendering engine. What theme(s) are you using? I'm updating my Voluntary theme to make it work better with the new Locus versions.


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openandromaps V4
theme Elevate 4

I don't know if there are updates after the 4 or minor releases

[Tobias]

I'm planning to adjust pathtext rendering for Elevate optimized for MF 0.12+ in a future release, when major support for it is more common. MF 0.12 was just released in September, so major apps like Locus and OruxMaps have it just integrated in their beta releases.
The small street names are a workaround because of the bad rendering with the earlier versions - better a small one than none at all. But now (a bit) larger ones are possible, but the theme has to be changed.

[john_percy]

An updated version of the Voluntary theme is available for download in this forum: https://forum.locusmap.eu/index.php?topic=2915.msg19296#msg19296

[Viajero Perdido]

I'm using OAM/Elevate, same as @lor74cas.  I had a hunch readability was at least partly a theme issue, at least as far as text size and white borders around the letters is concerned.

BTW, I usually have my text size at 150%, which makes road names hit the borders of the road they're rendered inside/atop, black hitting black, which makes white borders around the letters a bit more desirable.

Thanks John for the very fast update on your theme!  I'll check it out.

[Tobias]

BTW, I usually have my text size at 150%, which makes road names hit the borders of the road they're rendered inside/atop, black hitting black, which makes white borders around the letters a bit more desirable.

Could you post a screenshot where black is hitting black? There are white borders in Elevate around letters, so this shouldn't happen. It's probable that the borders aren't scaled as the text size in your 150% zoom option, but making borders thicker at 100% so that they look good at 150% isn't a solution.

[Viajero Perdido]

Here's a screenshot.  There IS actually a white border around the text, but it's very very thin.  Notice the "101" text in the lower right corner?  Even at this larger-than-tablet magnification, it's very hard to tell there's any separator.

BTW, I held the tablet - from which I took the screenshot - up against the LCD monitor on which I'm viewing this post, and the attachment preview shown below is only barely smaller than the matching image on my tablet.  So that preview is a pretty good approximation of reality, though of course at lower resolution.  This is why I need 150% or more.

Also, Locus beta 3.40.2.1 here is going nuts, drawing and redrawing the labels at two wildly different sizes.  Here I've caught a screenshot with both sizes shown at once.  Panning seems to trigger some re-rendering, and I had to pan a lot to line up things for the screenshot.

This is using a recent OAM V4 map with your latest (I think) Elevate theme.  Thanks for looking into this.,

I have to disappear shortly from the internet for a few days, sorry.

[lor74cas]

Attached two screenshots. Not all street names are so unreadable this is one of the worst example.

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[Tobias]

Here's a screenshot.  There IS actually a white border around the text, but it's very very thin.  Notice the "101" text in the lower right corner?  Even at this larger-than-tablet magnification, it's very hard to tell there's any separator.

Thanks, I thought you had examples without white border and there would be a bug. As said above, the border is not scaled 150%, so it is too small for letters at his size, but OK for what is was meant.

Also, Locus beta 3.40.2.1 here is going nuts, drawing and redrawing the labels at two wildly different sizes.  Here I've caught a screenshot with both sizes shown at once.  Panning seems to trigger some re-rendering, and I had to pan a lot to line up things for the screenshot.

I can't reproduce this, but the really small ones are either wrong or, like in the screenshot with "4m" scale, are too much zoomed in. Until it's optimized for MF 0.12, street names are mainly optimized for zoom 16/17, where there was a chance to see them in previous versions. As street width scales with zoom, but the text size doesn't, the street names look tiny at ZL 22 in your example, but are actually just the same size as in ZL17. I don't think there's any sense in adding lots of code for optimizing for zoom levels that don't have a practical value ;-)

I have to disappear shortly from the internet for a few days, sorry.

Good for you :-)