Reporter: tom[at]acrewoods.net
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 5.16am, Tuesday, 10th July 2007]

Comparing Mapnik to other maps such as A-Z (on a completely mapped area, of course), Mapnik isn't too good at rendering the names of small ways. I'd guess it's because Mapnik only writes names along the way in a single line, rather than having text above and below the way as well. It could also shorten "road" to "rd", "place" to "pl", and so on. Two examples:

Here, 'Besant Place' is rendered at zoom level 18 but no others, although there is plenty of space at level 17 and possibly space at 16:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.461921004143846&lon=-0.07821224290394427&zoom=18

In this example, 'Jarvis Road' isn't rendered at all (it's the fatter residential road coming off Melbourne Grove). Given that there's nothing to the left until you reach the (unrendered) hospital, there is plenty of space to squeeze this name in:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.46022479727068&lon=-0.07955871153778353&zoom=18

A related problem occurs with long ways, where the name only seems to get rendered once and in the middle at all zoom levels, rather than repeating the name at higher zoom levels so one doesn't have to drag the map around to find it. In this example most of the primary and secondary suffer from this problem, just zoom in to the top of Lordship Lane to see what I mean. With the junction of Barry Road & Peckham Rye (the two secondary ways) it's not even clear which road continues to the North, causing a bit of a navigational problem as well:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.45448897859278&lon=-0.0686260299610329&zoom=15