These are the CartoCSS map stylesheets for the Standard map layer on OpenStreetMap.org.

These stylesheets can be used in your own cartography projects, and are designed to be easily customised. They work with Kosmtik and also with the command-line CartoCSS processor.

Since August 2013 these stylesheets have been used on the OSMF tileservers (tile.openstreetmap.org), and are updated from each point release. They supersede the previous XML-based stylesheets.

You need a PostGIS database populated with OpenStreetMap data in the standard osm2pgsql database layout, along with auxillary shapefiles. See INSTALL.md.

Contributions to this project are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md for full details.

This project follows a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH versioning system. In the context of a cartographic project you can expect the following:

• PATCH: When a patch version is released, there would be no reason not to upgrade. PATCH versions contain only bugfixes e.g. stylesheets won't compile, features are missing by mistake, etc.
• MINOR: These are routine releases and happen every 2-5 weeks. They will contain changes to what's shown on the map, how they appear, new features added and old features removed. They may rarely contain changes to assets i.e. shapefiles and fonts but will not contain changes that require software or database upgrades.
• MAJOR: Any change the requires reloading a database, or upgrading software dependecies will trigger a major version change.

This was a full re-implementation of the original OSM style, with only a few bugs discovered later. There's been no interest in creating further point releases in the v1.x series.

The v2.x series initially focused on refactoring the style, both to to fix glitches and to leverage new features in CartoCSS / Mapnik to simplify the stylesheets with only small changes to the output, as well as removing 'old-skool' tagging methods that are now rarely used. It then started adding new features.

The v3.x series was triggered by an update to the required Mapnik and CartoCSS versions.

Care is being taken to not get too clever with variables and expressions. While these often make it easier to customise, experience has shown that over-cleverness (e.g. interpolated entities) can discourage contributions.

There are over 300 open requests, some that have been open for years. These need reviewing and dividing into obvious fixes, or additional new features that need some cartographic judgement.

The v4.x series will include osm2pgsql lua transforms and a hstore column with all other tags, allowing use of more OpenStreetMap data. Work is being done in the lua branch and issues have their own tag.

Initial releases will not make use of the new features, maintaining compatibility with v3.x and v3.x releases will continue with backports, allowing the style to be rendered from either a new database or an old one.

When sufficient time has passed for users to reload their databases, new features can be used and 3.x compatibility will not be maintained.

There are many open-source stylesheets written for creating OpenStreetMap-based maps using Mapnik, many based on this project. Some alternatives are:

• OSM-Bright
• XML-based stylesheets
• osmfr-cartocss
• openstreetmap-carto-german

• Andy Allan @gravitystorm
• Matthijs Melissen @math1985
• Paul Norman @pnorman
• Mateusz Konieczny @matkoniecz
• Daniel Koć @kocio-pl
• Christoph Hormann @imagico
• Michael Glanznig @nebulon42