As indicated in my Hack weekend report i updated the Styleinfo analysis of my Alternative Colors style. This includes some changes in the style i have not yet discussed here on the blog.

What is interesting to look at is the overall numbers of the old analysis and the current one. Previously, based on the style from late 2022, the analysis contained:

• 408 primary tags
• 211 secondary tags
• 1997 tag combinations
• 14831 renderings

Now it has:

• 473 primary tags
• 398 secondary tags
• 3038 tag combinations
• 22846 renderings

While not all of this difference is actual styling changes – there have been adjustment to the analysis heuristics that allow identifying stylings that were previously missed – roughly speaking the style has grown by 50 percent in terms of the taggings it interprets. But note that most of this is secondary tags. Nearly twice as many of those are interpreted now, most of them not as synonyms to other tags, but with distinct designs. The number of primary tags interpreted has grown less than 20 percent, which is primarily new POIs for human infrastructure and barriers.

This distribution reflects my overall approach in recent years to focus on depth rather than breadth and to add subtle differentiation to common base designs to keep the map intuitively readable even with a large number of features. Think of the augmentation of parking symbols, the viewpoint rendering or the various extensions of road rendering – none of which involve any additional primary tags.

Keep in mind that the Styleinfo tagging model does not cover all the variants how tags are interpreted in a complex map style. That includes all tertiary tags (like offshore wind generators or the differentiation of bell tower symbols by roof type shown here), combinations of several secondary tags leading to a distinct design, but also things like the improvements of POI labeling or the multilingual name labeling with language dependent fonts.

And there are, of course, also plenty of changes in the style that do not turn up in the overall numbers at all, while they are documented in the rendering samples – like the differentiation of barriers previously rendered in a uniform design.

With this update the Alternative Colors style is now also available in Taginfo.

In addition to the Alternative Colors style update i also updated the Styleinfo analysis of OSM-Carto – which indirectly likewise updates the Taginfo data that has been available since November.