[HN Gopher] Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStre...
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Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data
Author : thibautg
Score : 484 points
Date : 2022-05-03 05:34 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manuelclaeysbouuaert.be)
(TXT) w3m dump (manuelclaeysbouuaert.be)
| RickyPointin wrote:
| ageitgey wrote:
| As an avid fan of both old maps and QGIS, I just want to say that
| this is rad. Great job!
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| The old maps had way better contrast, it seems.
| severak_cz wrote:
| Because old map was printed on paper and main data displayed
| was the map itself.
|
| New digital maps are shown on screen and main data is mostly
| something else and map itself is used as a backdrop for it.
| ktpsns wrote:
| Modern Google/Apple maps are incredibly low contrast and I
| don't know why. Seems like they want to have streets and land
| stand back to make room for features such as pin locations,
| buisness markings (advertising) or dedicated layers such as
| traffic.
|
| I really don't get it. Here in Germany, in the last century,
| "road atlases" were a thing, big maps with great overview and
| detail maps which were basically at maximum contrast. For
| examples, see for instance
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=autokarte+deutschland&iax=i...
|
| It seems that OSM (OpenStreetMaps) gets this "more right" in
| some respect, but still it is not the same. Why? Too little
| confidence of the map makers to highlight the correct things?
| tuyiown wrote:
| One explanation would be that roads are not the useful
| information on modern map, you search for you POI or address,
| and then query an itinerary, and then you have a very
| contrasty road, the one you need.
|
| I suspect just looking at maps to find your way is a more and
| more cornered case.
| pieno wrote:
| This was indeed a very deliberate choice by Google, and
| they have been blogging about it since at least 2011[0].
| There are quite some blog posts by Google and others
| discussing the evolution in online maps from the high
| contrast design focused on roads and cities, to more
| "fluid" designs where there is a bit more room to show
| buildings, forests, waterways and other landmarks that are
| more suited for exploration rather than navigation.
|
| [0] https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/07/evolving-look-of-
| google-...
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > where there is a bit more room to show buildings,
| forests, [...]
|
| ? What forests and what buildings, though? The 2009 -
| 2011 changes are fine, I guess (indeed I don't need the
| roads _that_ prominently as they were in the 2009
| examples), but at some point beyond that they did jump
| the shark somewhat with their changes.
|
| My personal pet peeve is that at zoom level 14, all
| distinction between built-up areas and non-built up areas
| [1] disappears and you're looking at just one indistinct
| mess of hazy streets on a grey back background and you
| can't even really tell the shape of a city from looking
| at that. Individual buildings only come in at zoom level
| 17, by which point you're already quite zoomed in, and
| forests remain stubbornly hidden.
|
| Google has the somewhat better POI integration and
| traffic information, but when I want to actually look at
| a map for orienting myself or getting a feel for an area,
| I much prefer Openstreetmap's style.
|
| [1] At least where I live, the further distinction
| between forests and non-forested open spaces is rather
| rudimentary - a few random areas of fields and other open
| spaces are correctly shown in some sort of ochre at zoom
| level <= 13, but large areas are simply all drawn in
| green regardless of whether they're actually forests or
| not.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I find this quite sad and humorous at the same time.
| Personally, I'm one that loves looking at maps to
| familiarize myself with street names in an area of interest
| rather than the specific route the great Map gods of the
| cloud have decided for me. I tend to not rely on turn by
| turn navigation, and actually find it quite annoying with
| its incessant "in 500ft", "in 400ft", "in 300ft" kind of
| nagging. Being around people that are absolutely dependant
| on turn-by-turn directions make gives me a laugh though. On
| a cross country trip where you're on the same major high
| going West for >1000m doesn't need turn by turn, yet I've
| been on a trip with someone that had a damn near panic
| attack because I started driving without the navigation
| running. Sad they were that stressed about it, but still
| damn funny
| wtallis wrote:
| People being that reliant on turn by turn navigation is
| not just sad, it's also quite dangerous. Any time the
| navigation app's instructions are wrong, unclear or
| simply a bit too late, it is quite likely to cause that
| kind of driver to make a sudden and unsafe maneuver.
| Having a general familiarity with your planned route and
| its surroundings before you put the car in gear goes a
| long way toward preventing those panicked reactions.
| marssaxman wrote:
| My partner relies completely on navigation assistants,
| but they didn't exist when I learned to drive, and I
| never bothered to adopt them. What's funny is that I feel
| just as stressed out trying to drive _with_ the navigator
| as my partner does without it! I am so used to having a
| high-level sense of the route, and knowing the scale of
| the turns and the roads involved, that I feel confused
| and disoriented if I try to just blindly follow the
| directions. I 'm not very good at blindly following,
| either - I can't relate the distances given to a real-
| world sense of scale, so I frequently miss turns. Really
| funny how different the mental strategies used to solve
| the same problem can be.
| plafl wrote:
| Road atlases were the same in Spain. I think the reason is
| that they are not interactive, that's the all the zoom level
| you are going to get and so they are extremely dense with
| information.
|
| I think that for interactive use google maps are way better,
| they avoid information overload by presenting a very
| schematic representation. Old road atlases look like versions
| of Where's Waldo?.
| kall wrote:
| You might enjoy the Mobile Atlas tiles from Thunderforest
| [0].
|
| I think the low contrast on Google Maps is uniquely
| ridiculous. You don't have to go all the way to OSM / road
| atlas. I think Mapbox Streets, Apple Maps (somewhat) and Gaia
| Topo Lite (my go to) are all perfectly fine maps with roughly
| the same "feel".
|
| Google Maps contrast is so ridiculous that I have a private
| app called "Kontrast Maps" that is just the Maps SDK with a
| high contrast style applied. Me and a friend with a visually
| impairment get a ton of use out of that. I would love to
| publish it if it weren't for the insane pricing on Maps iOS
| SDK.
|
| I'm also disappointed enabling "High Contrast" in Apple
| operating systems doesn't apply a high contrast maps style.
| Seems like a super obvious accessibility feature.
|
| [0] https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/mobile-atlas/
| xxswagmasterxx wrote:
| OsmAnd has a German Road Atlas style:
| http://docs.osmand.net/docs/user/map/vector-maps#road-style
|
| And the OSM map also has different stlyes, like this traffic
| style which highlights important roads: https://www.openstree
| tmap.org/#map=13/52.4205/10.7808&layers...
| widerporst wrote:
| The Transport Map on OSM highlights bus lines, not
| important roads.
| Pinus wrote:
| Cartographic generalization is an AI-complete problem. It is
| doable for a human to decide what to show or not, in order to
| get a useful map without too much clutter. It is much harder
| to program a computer to do it. It is very tempting to turn
| down contrast to make a cluttered map less "loud".
| kqr wrote:
| Yeah, this is ridiculous: https://i.xkqr.org/gmapsvsosm.png
|
| The top one is completely unusable if you want to do anything
| other than drive a car on the highway, in which case it's
| actually quite good.
|
| (I picked this area specifically because it contains highway,
| railway, footpaths, water, residential area, industrial area,
| open fields, forest, and wetland. You wouldn't know, though,
| if you only looked at the top map. But it's not a location
| picked to be unfavourable to Google Maps - I sampled a few
| other places in the world where OSM coverage is likely to be
| decent, and it's the same story everywhere.)
| widerporst wrote:
| I really don't get it why Google doesn't show forests at
| >13 zoom. I've read people claim that this makes the map
| easier to read. But I can't be the only one who orients
| himself on a map based on boundaries between forests,
| residential areas, and fields.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Is there a way to make Goog's turn-by-turn to not be
| street name based but instead give directions like old
| timers did using landmark navigation?
|
| At the old farm house, turn left. After going aways down
| the road, turn right at by the building with the white
| archways. Take the next left when you get to the statue
| of the first mayor.
| marssaxman wrote:
| For full flavor, you'd have to include references to
| landmarks which no longer exist: "if you pass the vacant
| lot where the old drugstore used to be, turn around,
| because you've gone too far."
| iggldiggl wrote:
| A bit like https://xkcd.com/461/, you mean?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| In OsmAnd it displays forest as green areas in low zoom,
| then only tree pattern in high zoom.
| dspillett wrote:
| I've noticed on Ordnance Survey's online maps, the contrast
| seems lower when printing caps of the 1:25K maps (I take
| custom paper versions of planned routes out with me, in case
| both my own nav and my tech options fail) from the new
| version of their online offering (which us hold-outs have
| recently been force upgraded to). Though it doesn't look
| noticeably different on-screen.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| >road atlases
|
| This type of map is good (or even necessary) for paper map.
| If you can't find the name of the place you want to go,
| you're doomed.
|
| It's not for a digital one where you can zoom (to show
| different levels of detail/labels) and search.
| jhgb wrote:
| On that note, one thing I've wanted to do for quite some time
| is an application that would allow you to open an image file
| or a set of image files with a particular style of map and it
| would try to replicate that style with OSM data. Ideally
| emitting that style in a Mapserver mapfile, or a Mapnik style
| file, or whatever. If you prefer German-style road atlases,
| you should be able to have them with OSM data. Doing such
| things by hand seems incredibly tedious, though.
| de_huit wrote:
| I really miss poring over big sheets of paper to find nice
| routes to cycle over... Especially in France, the Michelin
| 200.000 maps are unrivaled to not only find your way, but also
| have a good feel how the road and the landscape looks like.
| [1].
|
| These Michelin maps have a great feature I've not seen
| elsewhere: traffic intensity is rendered with color
| (white=quiet, red=busy) and road-width is rendered as width,
| binned at a few standard widths. I would love to see that on
| openstreetmap.
|
| [1]
| https://www.viamichelin.nl/static/1.462.0/html/michelinmap.h...
| markstos wrote:
| Love it!
| starwind wrote:
| Is that how the colors of the maps actually looked in 1777? I
| always assumed that the colors had faded but I never really
| thought about it until now
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Well done! This is a beautiful tribute.
| pachico wrote:
| I've always been fascinated by old cartography. How did they even
| have such precision? Which tools did they have? And how did they
| store the information?
| daedalus_f wrote:
| You might find the retriangulation of Britain in the 1930s and
| 40s interesting [1]. A network of ~6,500 triangulation pillars
| (trig points) were built across the country, each of which were
| in line of sight of at least two other pillars. The pillars
| each have a mounting point for a theodolite, to allow their
| position to be calculated from the relative angle and elevation
| of other visible trig points.
|
| They are often on the top of hills or mountains and so have a
| warm place in my heart from signifying the high-point of many a
| hike.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retriangulation_of_Great_Brita...
| gelatocar wrote:
| just in case you haven't already seen it, David Rumsey's
| website is the most amazing collection of historical maps.
| https://www.davidrumsey.com/
| bjarneh wrote:
| Superb website, very cool!
| m_eiman wrote:
| The Swedish government has about a million (literally!)
| historical maps available online, unfortunately it seems the
| interface is only in Swedish...
|
| https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/
|
| Here's an example, a regional map from 1654 including
| Gothenburg:
|
| https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/hk/viewer/internal/.
| ..
| pachico wrote:
| No, I wasn't aware of that, thanks! I can really see how you
| can get hooked by something like this.
| pbowyer wrote:
| Also https://maps.nls.uk/ is a great place to explore old
| maps
| stop50 wrote:
| they usually used triangulation, the same as today. they select
| an line as the startimg point and measure it exactly as
| possible(doesn't need to be long) and then you can calculate
| the rest with the measured angles of the area you want to
| measure. The rest is replicating it on paper with the required
| factor.
| pachico wrote:
| Thanks! It still a bit unclear to me but I'll dig more.
| Cheers
| ghaff wrote:
| Here's an example from the original survey of India.
| https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-
| exhibits/exhibits/show/ind...
|
| In the US, if you hike, you'll often find circular USGS
| survey markers inset into mountain and hill tops.
| hjjjjjje wrote:
| Dragging the sliders doesn't work when viewing on a mobile
| device.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Works fine on my iphone 12 with ios 14.5.1
| dspillett wrote:
| Extra anecdata in case the creator is reading: sliders failed
| for me on Android Chrome this morning. I made no effort to
| check if this was due to a script failing to load or some
| other bug.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Same here, on Android Chrome.
|
| The JS script that the author is using relies on listening to
| both mousedown and touchstart events, etc. It isn't clear to me
| why Android has a problem with that, but I wonder if switching
| to listening only for pointer events [1] would fix things.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_eve...
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Several of the original maps have some added topology on them,
| and I think a simplified hill shade could help pop the new ones
| in a similar manner. You can put it on with something like 90%
| transparency and get a bit of a pop to add more depth to it. I
| used to do this back when I still made paper maps, but it should
| work just as well in a totally digital format.
|
| Edit: On the github readme the author addresses this some.
| General elevation data isn't in OSM, so it was deemed out of
| scope for this project.
| wiredfool wrote:
| The datasets are out there, and it's totally possible to do in
| QGIS. I've done it for Ireland so that I had hillshade on my
| personal cycling friendly maps.
|
| You just need a DEM model of the area of interest and run a
| hillshade operation on it. There are a couple of decent DEM
| datasets, SRTM and Gebco are two that I've run across.
| ssl232 wrote:
| I dabbled in web-based mapping a couple years ago and found the
| tech stack to be really quite polished. Starting from a database
| of features from e.g. OpenStreetMap hosted in a Postgres-based
| PostGIS map server, and geographical boundaries via special shape
| files, you can write XML files representing the features you wish
| to see on each layer of the map (using SQL queries intended for
| PostGIS), and CSS-like style files representing how the features
| should look. You then set up a tile server (Apache or nginx or
| whatever) that generates tiles on demand and performs caching.
| Finally you use a JavaScript library to provide the "slippy map"
| that users can drag around.
|
| All of these layers of the tech stack have FOSS implementations;
| indeed most of the most widely used ones are FOSS. And then
| there's QGIS (also FOSS) to do most of this in a similar fashion,
| but offline.
|
| As merely a dabbler having a bit of fun, it's rather excellent I
| must say. It would be interesting to hear from anyone working in
| this field professionally as to how the FOSS tools measure up.
| [deleted]
| mjbrownie wrote:
| I've recently started working in this space. Loads of
| applications in research, Ag tech and environmental science and
| it's mostly using this tech stack (as well as GeoServer.)
| Definitely a nice change from my typical ecommerce/saas work.
| Working with some long term geo/surveyor types and they seem
| happy with the open source offerings.
| navbaker wrote:
| QGIS is enormously valuable to those of us who need to do what
| I would non-authoritatively term "intermediate level geospatial
| analysis" in jobs that might not have geospatial analysis as
| part of the official job description, but don't have thousands
| of dollars available for the ludicrously expensive ArcGIS
| license.
| starwind wrote:
| I find the analysts still need ArcGIS, but on the geospatial
| software development side I've never run into something I
| couldn't use QGIS for
| ixfo wrote:
| We do a huge amount of very complex analysis and entirely
| run QGIS. Looked at ArcGIS and decided it wasn't anywhere
| near worth the money, and getting into their ecosystem at
| all makes it borderline impossible to interop with e.g.
| QGIS sensibly.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| My current job has pretty low standards for maps in
| reports, and unfortunately QGIS has a dealbreaker issue:
| I'd like to just import a basemap, display my data on top,
| and then export as an image; however, in QGIS the
| resolution of the basemap scales with the resolution of the
| export. So, for example, if you want a 300 dpi image, all
| the city and and street labels (from the basemap) will be
| microscopic. It's baffling that the software does this, and
| as a result I have to use ArcMap for these simple maps.
| ixfo wrote:
| QGIS will, for raster basemaps, fetch the detailed
| version to get you your high DPI detail but this of
| course involves stitching together lots of tiles from the
| basemap's lower zoom levels - which then have small
| labels. For raster maps which are not labelled, it makes
| complete sense and produces a much better result than the
| alternative (picking the "scale based" zoom level and
| interpolating).
|
| This is kind of the only "right" answer when dealing with
| raster basemaps. It's either pixellated or going to be
| rendered "too small" for the zoom level.
|
| Vector basemaps don't have this problem, and QGIS
| supports them, so that's the way to go if you can get
| data. QGIS can then render at the required DPI in full
| clarity but with elements scaled/positioned
| appropriately.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| > Vector basemaps don't have this problem
|
| I was about to firmly disagree, but perhaps my issue is
| that I've been assuming XYZ tiles were vector. Maybe
| _some_ are vector, based on the connection? If I'm
| remembering right, I imported a load of XYZ sources, and
| then never thought twice about them. I should have been
| more discerning. I'll look deeper into getting some
| proper vector basemaps.
|
| > This is kind of the only "right" answer when dealing
| with raster basemaps.
|
| I believe ArcMap uses rasters (when you choose the simple
| "add data" feature and one of their pre-selected
| basemaps), but they still render the labels appropriately
| when you export.
| stult wrote:
| That is such an absurdly specific but accurate description. I
| used to manage a site that had a lot of geospatial elements,
| including various custom maps and obscure (outside of the GIS
| world) data formats like geotiffs or KML or DTED or the WMM.
| Coming from a non-GIS background and without the need for an
| expensive solution like ArcGIS, I have no idea how I would
| have sanity checked any of it without QGIS
| martin_a wrote:
| Side note: I love this style of "artwork". I also enjoy old books
| with paintings, older maps and whatnot and can look at them for
| hours.
|
| Maybe it's because I work in print media and know how fast and
| good modern tools are, so I can estimate (and value) how
| complicated it was to create all the graphics in former times.
|
| So: Great project to bring back the old style for modern data.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| There needs to be an icon set for gallows, gibbets, witch
| pyres, and dragon lairs and for coastal areas, sea monsters,
| whirlpools, mermaids, treasure, and of course an edge of the
| flat world.
| de_huit wrote:
| Nice project, and nice map! I did not know the Ferraris map, it
| is gorgeous.
|
| It would love to see a tile server of this map, preferably with a
| switch between the old and the new map.
|
| There is a 'time travel app' for Belgium [1] that includes the
| Ferraris map, and even older maps. It's a bit clunky, I like the
| Dutch topotijdreis (topo-time-travel) [2] a lot more, but it
| seems like the maps are not as old and not as good, I have to
| slide to 1898 to get a colored map of Amsterdam.
|
| [1] https://www.geopunt.be/kaart?app=Reis_door_de_tijd_app
|
| [2] https://www.topotijdreis.nl/kaart/1898/@122079,487387,9.49
| Aardwolf wrote:
| This looks like a decent interactive Ferraris 1777 map:
| https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/belgium-1777/
| janlaureys wrote:
| Cool, my street was already there in 1777. I absolute love this.
| marklit wrote:
| Just this morning I finished watching a tutorial on setting up
| qgis, installing plugins and building a multi-layer map of
| Mumbai. Very much recommended for anyone looking into GIS
| https://youtu.be/jgbTosOPU-U
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's crazy to see how much has remained the same, even if so many
| new things were added. Looks like pretty much all the buildings
| that existed in 1777 still exist today.
|
| Even crazier to think that at the time the original map was made,
| pretty much all cities in the US didn't even exist yet.
| hinoki wrote:
| The Measure Of All Things is a book about the effort to measure
| the circumference of the earth to establish the length of the
| metre, about twenty years after these maps were made. The book
| goes into a bit of the technology used to reduce errors.
|
| But on further reading, it looks like there was an advance in
| theodolite design between when these maps were published and
| the survey for the metre. Wikipedia provides a good rabbit
| hole.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847635.The_Measure_of_Al...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I purchased a 350 year old roadmap for my locality. It was
| still usable. The main roads, town placements and landscape
| features don't shift much!
| qwertox wrote:
| It's interesting to see how segmented Antwerpen was back in 1777,
| what the author describes as hedges.
|
| These were usually the result of inheritance, when the land of
| one owner got split into pieces and each child then got one
| piece. They got smaller and smaller.
|
| I didn't think that this was already so extreme in 1777, but
| comparing it to the other maps, only Antwerpen and Brugge seem to
| be affected.
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