Important label blocked by unimportant icon (for example amenity=university vs private parking icon)

[matkoniecz]

from #287

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/41.86037/12.49663
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1517075

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/257147754

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.81602&mlon=12.93069#map=19/50.81602/12.93069
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/24518628

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.81602&mlon=12.93069#map=18/41.86018/12.49709

[matthijsmelissen]

Letting the minimum zoomlevel of icons depend on the area size would be a way to solve this, I think.

[matkoniecz]

Not sure. Icon of gigantic private parking should disappear under typical label. Also in this example this parking is quite large - not displaying this icon for other similarly sized parkings seems to be a poor idea.

[matkoniecz]

Example reported by @Morphan - http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.42924427986145&mlon=6.800687313079834#map=16/51.4292/6.8007&layers=N

[matkoniecz]

I propose to move parking icon to .amenity-low-priority layer - it should fix this problem.

[matthijsmelissen]

This is an issue that is being reported repeatedly, but it's not clear what the best solution is. Does anybody have a suggestion?

[matkoniecz]

Move more icons/labels to .amenity-low-priority layer? Or create .amenity-high-priority layer for some labels (university, school)?

Or sort objects by area - I think that it is already done for some features.

[matthijsmelissen]

Moving icons to low-priority might improve the situation (for parking and playground for example), but some problems will remain. A small shop in a hospital might still block the hospital label for example.

Or sort objects by area

Objects are sorted by area, but that's not sufficient as icons always come before labels.

[HolgerJeromin]

and some things are nodes with no area.

[matkoniecz]

@HolgerJeromin

some things are nodes with no area

What indicates low importance. And in areas where mapping is just starting and universities are mapped as nodes it is unlikely that there are big problem with high feature density.

[kocio-pl]

I think this is more general problem: on high zoom levels I'm expecting to see all the small features, while when zooming out I expect to loose details and see only bigger objects.

[jeisenbe]

I believe this problem still exists because all icons from amenity-points are rendered before text-poly and other text labels. This means that if there is any feature with an icon rendered, such as a parking lot or a drinking fountain, it will block the text label for a large feature, such as a University.

This also happens with features that are rendered with both an icon and a label. In that case, and important text label may be blocked by another minor feature located just south of the important feature.

This might be resolved by creating a new layer for important text labels which would render before all icons, or by merging the amenity point and text layers and using a priority ranking list to determine rendering order for icons and text together, but it would be difficult to get the priority right.

(BTW, does anyone know of an issue that describes this problem more generally? I think we've discussed in comments on other issues as well. Related issues include #1026 - where it is mentioned that some text labels disappear or reappear when zooming in)