For two years after the Nov 2016 edition of the world overview maps I have worked on the curation of additional content to be put on top of the variouis background maps for the different zoom levels. Why ? I am a curious traveler to places where “always on” is (still) a lie. In the case of interest in something about a country or region or province, too much jumping back and forth from offline Wikipedia (like Aard2 or Kiwix) is annoyance. So, I put a number of information directly into the world overview maps:
– The capitals of countries, states and provinces of many countries are shown in 3 different colours, in English and local language (if significantly different).
– Islands and archipelagos, in particular the remote ones, are hard to spot on maps – here is remedy by highlighting them, from zoom level 3 up.
– Triggered by an OAM forum discussion about visibility of peaks, and with the help of Max’ algorithm to select, 100s of important peaks are highlighted.
– Also the major ocean deeps are shown.
Some insights into the process: the current MOBAC rendering tool with the Mapsforge library embedded does not provide a proper visibility of labels like settlement names. Even big cities may not show up at all. Using Maperitive in addition allows to take control of the label renditions in a predictable way. Unfortunately, Maperitive has a bug omitting the leftmost or rightmost of a label for a fraction of a label. Playing with scope and zoom around the affected place the missing parts can be added in a manual patch step (at least for the most visible cases like highlighted capitals – I hope I caught those all). Once you go this route, this opens an additional option: make larger settlements dominate the label display in a much more accurate way than the simple city-town-village-… attributes in OSM would allow. Hence now also the size of the settlement labels increases by population (in 11 catagories), if provided in the OSM data set (hopefully correctly!), otherwise a minimum assumption is made for the OSM categories city, town and village. As Maperitive is an OSM tool, this is achieved by amending the original data with categories of population sizes. Those “PopCat” tags are now also embedded in Christian’s OAM maps. They can be used by themes to select (restrict) the settlement names to be displayed. The adaption of the latest Elevate theme is on my list for 2018, but maybe somebody else is faster 
Bottom line: the intent behind all that is to have essential geo information at a finger tip, fully OFFLINE. A sort of companion for Offline Wikipedia. Enjoy!
Michael Bechtold
Elevate updates don’t bring huge changes anymore, but smaller ones, that, when added up, make a big difference altogether. Therefore once again the hint here that only with current map styles and maps all improvements get visible. Recently those were important changes in Elevate, and some smaller ones as well. Look at the legend for further information.
- a new overlay for extended road surface information
- new via ferrata rendering
- solid/dashed borders for cycleways
- changed visibility information for paths without sac_scale
- prominent peaks are now shown earlier and, if the app supports it, are prioritized
- hiking waycolor is displayed along waymarks
- the overlay contents have been rearranged a bit
- access limits are much more accurate to the mode of transportation the map style is made for
The newest downloads and the changelog can be found as always on the Elevate page, and for e-mail notifications for further updates of Elevate just subscribe to this thread in the forum.
Best regards,
Tobias
Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,
another year is drawing to a close, already the sixth year for OAM.
Time to say “thanks” to all the people contibuting new, better Data for OAM like
@Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
@MaxBe who found a way to sort mountain peaks by “importance” so we could render the important ones in lower zoom-levels – an improvement that is included in the december map update.
I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.
Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.
The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!
Yes, I know..
Kommunikation from my side to the OpenAndroMaps community could – and should – be better (by far) 
A lot of improvements happened during 2017 – OAM is’nt on idle at all, we are working hard to improve, add new Features, include external Data, aso..
Here a small overview about improvements so far in 2017:
Maps:
- Abbreviations for Street / Place names in many languages for more reliable rendering (eg Street / Strasse > St.)
- Better rendering of cycletracks and lanes along roads
- Put_in / regress / portage_ways for paddlers included in map_data
- @Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
- @Tobias constantly improves the Elevate / Elements rendertheme.
- Constant evolution of the multilanguage maps > now (eg) PidginChines works reliable
- Better redering of access rights and road surfaces
- Difficult scale (sac_scale) for mountain paths without restrictions
- Names for Islands / Archipelagos now render much better and at lower zoom levels – appearence is driven by calculated size of area covered
- @Michael works for a better set of GeneralMaps
- …
Website:
- Server moved to new, more reliable provider with up to date infrastructure
- Protokoll moved to HTTPS
- New version of WordPress theme with much better apperance and faster rendering on mobile devices
- aso..
However the best of all is about to come.
December update will bring a real great improvement for hikers and alpinists.
Best regards
Team of OAM