cities and towns in low zoom levels

[max-dn]

The rendering of cities and towns at Zoom<11 strongly depends on their population. That's ok in Europe, where most place=* have a mapped population. It leads to sparse labeled map in other regions, where are only small towns or towns without population=*

For example I would like to see Padum (town,p=null) and Leh (city,capital=5,p=5000)(*) in this area, and also in Europe there would be enough space to show Landeck (town,p=7336) or Corte (town,p=6915) in the map.

Maybe it is a good idea to have an additional field in lowzoom_cities with something like "most important place in a area of N kilometers" (and to interpret it as "we have M pixel space for useful labels").

Max

(*) Wikipedia says "population=30870". Maybe we also have a problem with the reliability of our data ;)

[der-stefan]

This reminds me of your map project "topographic isolation" ("Dominanz"): OSM Wiki (German)

[max-dn]

This reminds me of your map project "topographic isolation" ("Dominanz")

It was Wolf's idea: Distance to the next bar with beer of better or at least same quality ;)

[mboeringa]

Wouldn't it be an idea to use OpenStreetMap Carto's routines for this? Looking at the comparison below, it seems to me the quite recent work done by @nebulon42 on Carto for this (e.g. see PRs gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto#2314 and gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto#1461), is doing pretty well.

And Z9 of region of India: