Open Street Map - Maplexed

Open Street Map is Maplexed (Cartographic Text Placement Software)


OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.

Because the Ordnance Survey have the monopoly in th UK for Geographical Data and have crown copyright on all it's datasets. Good for standardisation of the data - data must be maintained at all scales across the UK. However the recent change in datasets. Landline being replaced by Mastermap and OSCAR replaced by ITN
(in this there is no link between these two datasets which for updating street maps is ridiculous).
There is one difference. Cost. It's expensive. Licencing is confusing and Ordnance Survey do not like any form of competetion.

So there now appears to be an alternative - Do it yourself (with a few helpers) with a GPS logger
The results are not perfect but they come close, close enough when free.

OSM was converted to Illustrator from a postgis database after

• Downloading data from OSM
• Load in file into postgis
• Export to shape file format
• Re-project the data from geographic to British National Grid
• Re-coded (in arcmap) to match LovellJohns MapVU range
• Maplexed (text placement) this re-coded data
• Exported to Illustrator