mapscanner styles

The mapscanner package is able to generate maps in the three styles provided by mapbox. The ms_generate_map() function has a bw parameter with a default of TRUE to generate black-and-white maps, including conversion of coloured mapbox styles to black-and-white. The use of coloured maps, generated with bw = FALSE, is not generally recommended in mapscanner, and overdrawn markings are identified exclusively by colour, and any markings in a colour which is also present in the underlying maps will generally not be accurately identified.

Because illustrations of these map styles requires files too large to be placed inside an R package, they are not included with this vignette. The styles can nevertheless be easily examined from the main mapbox styles page, or by clicking the hyperlinked text below, and are:

1. style = "light" - the generally recommended style for mapscanner, “designed to provide geographic context while highlighting the data on your analytics dashboard, data visualization, or data overlay.
2. style = "streets", which is, “a comprehensive, general-purpose map that emphasizes accurate, legible styling of road and transit networks.
3. style = "outdoors", which is, “a general-purpose map with curated tilesets and specialized styling tailored to hiking, biking, and the most adventurous use cases”.

Alternatively, these different styles can be examined for any desired area with the following code.

bb <- osmdata::getbb ("<name of location>")
shrink <- 0.3 # shrink that bounding box to 30% size
bb <- t (apply (bb, 1, function (i) {
    mean (i) + c (-shrink, shrink) * diff (i) / 2
}))

ms_generate_map (
    bbox = bb,
    max_tiles = 16L,
    mapname = "map-light",
    style = "light"
)
ms_generate_map (
    bbox = bb,
    max_tiles = 16L,
    mapname = "omaha-streets",
    style = "streets",
    bw = FALSE
)
ms_generate_map (
    bbox = bb,
    max_tiles = 16L,
    mapname = "omaha-outdoors",
    style = "outdoors",
    bw = FALSE
)