Category talk:Map pointers
comment[edit]
Since I seem to be one of the few people who use multiple map icons (Saskatchewan River fur trade, Russian conquest of the Caucasus), my comments may be of some value. Multiple icons sometimes look sloppy (Dagestan Uprising (1920)), but give the editor easy control over some parts of the map.
Most icons seem useless and are rarely used ("Crime symbol mobilehome fire80px.png"). There is no index and it is hard to be sure that you have searched all the categories. You usually have to copy several onto a test map to find one that works. Icon names are irregular, hard to remember and usually must be copied with cntl-C ("AS-skrzyzowanie-icon-blau.svg" is a blue X, "NChart-Symbol INT Rock CoverUncover.svg" is the only asterisk I could find ). It might be good to have a table of standard shapes (circle, square, triangle, star...) each in five colors. If they had standard fixed-length names they would be easy to remember and show up better in code. Since F=French is a little clearer than blue=French it might be good to have an icon for each letter and digit, possibly in several colors. It might even be possible to define position=center which would drop the icon and start the label at the lat/long. This would convert 1-letter labels into icons and be more exact (Russo-Persian War (1804–13)). A set of lines in various directions (line00,line10...lin170 +line45,lin135) would allow drawing lines. They could be lengthened with marksize= but this would thicken then, so it might not work.
Since multiple icons are rarely used there is no reason to do any of this work now, but it might become good in the future. It is not clear whether multiple icons are useless or just hard to use. Benjamin Trovato (talk) 21:21, 5 October 2015 (UTC)