Author: clockwerx
[Added to the original trac issue at 4.33am, Saturday, 27th July 2013]

Are you able to attach screenshots or link to an area that shows the issue?

Author: ircama
[Added to the original trac issue at 9.00am, Saturday, 27th July 2013]

This example shows an Openstreetmap rendering which is almost useless for topographical purposes:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.8957&lon=10.0074&zoom=14&layers=M

No description of places, ridges and valleys. If you need something to study a mountain region, you currently need to leave out Openstreetmap and select other cartographic systems.

The dramatic problem is related to the virtual extension of this issue, which might cover all European Alpine area (and possibly a relevant part of the world territory).

The most important aspect is related to missing information in Openstreetmap database, but this is not even the case of the above mentioned URL: as a matter of fact, if you go to this zoom

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.89188&lon=10.00812&zoom=15&layers=M

you can read terms as Moia, Costa p Stomegard, Valle Righenzolo, Valle di B, Zenecla, Arec, etc.

This is because this region includes tags like natural=ridge and natural=valley.

Even if the linear geometric orientation of these terms is correct, you might notice that not only they are not shown at low zoom levels, but also that their font and character spacing does not allow to clearly render the name of these places. Each name should have been distributed along the whole length of the related line with wider font size.

In my opinion this is currently the major Openstreetmap and Mapnik drawback.

Check the attached sample map sample1.png, which is a printscreen of JOSM for this region, where Openstreetmap data are layered over a topographical map correctly representing places, ridges and valleys. To highlight the region names, I enclosed them with blue drawings. You might notice valid fonts and character spacing close to the related JOSM lines that are wrongly rendered by Mapnik.

Notice also that, even if this ticket relates to natural=valley, the issue is the same for natural=ridge.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/ridge

I have attached some samples of other topographical maps representing this kind of names (see map.png and map1.png).

Author: math1985
[Added to the original trac issue at 4.29pm, Monday, 28th July 2014]

This issue is now being discussed on Github: gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto#787

Therefore, I will close the issue here.