Maps and articles

Well, once we have drawn nice maps, we simply can include them into our articles as we do with all other images, right? --- No, unfortunately not. This article is about the pecularities of maps compared to photo images.

Scalability
A photo downscaled as thumbnail images still looks good in an article. Downscaled maps usually lead to a trash image. Specially if you print an article, those maps are worthless. This is because maps are full with details that get blured when trying to scale the map.

Labels
Maps have text labels. This is why maps should be stored in PNG format rather than in JPEG format. However, there still remains a problem when printing a map, because the map image has to be scaled in order to fit the printer's resolution. The state of art would be PDF maps for printing and PNG maps for display in the web browser.

Maps in articles
Ideally, maps in articles should be readable as they appear in the article. Currently, many of our maps are only suitable after having downloaded them in full resolution. Althought not nice, it's still possible to use them online, but in printed articles, those maps are pointless.

The usual image size in articles is between 200 and 350 pixels. In most cases, this is too small for maps. At the other hand, making them bigger messes up the article's text.

Consequently, maps in articles only can give a rough overview, but no futher details.

Maps associated to articles
The solution of the map dilema seems to be to keep maps out off the article, but to provide some mechanism that associates maps to an article. This might be done by an additional link in the toolbox (or wherever) that leads the user to a special page with maps that belong to the article in question. On those special pages, there would be enough space to display map images in full screen size. The user could choose from some standard maps, e.g.
 * normal - a map showing the whole location in standard representation.
 * overview - a map with the location and its surounding.
 * geological - empathizes mountains, rivers, surface covering etc., but drops most of the infrastructural features.
 * clickable - clickable navigation maps.
 * details - if necessary, maybe details of the city's center.
 * printable - printable maps in PDF.
 * maybe more

Authors should be able to register a map image for each of this above map flavours.

Automatic maps
OSM has quite a good coverage for Europe and the USA, but big lacks in many other regions. In most cases, the OSM data set has enough details for overview maps. However, we also have many locations where we need our hand drawn maps already present on shared:. It might be a good solution to make automaps to be the default, but allow the authors to overwrite this with other map images.