#Geoinformatics geeks: why is it a hard problem to make all street names visible on a given window over a map?

This is an old support request of mine:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/8256-missing-street-names/8

... but I'm struggling on a weekly basis with this problem using different maps.

@buherator Do do you have the problem also with real maps like OSM, offficial government maps or hiking maps or only with glorified yelp front ends? Usually this shouldn't be a problem.

@twomikecharlie As I wrote I have this problem all the time with different maps. That includes OSM (also mentioned in the ticket) and GMaps.

@buherator To me, the OSM screenshot (with standard rendering) in the ticket doesn't seem to have the problem. It only does not show street names for a certain level of street, which the renderer decided is to small. For commercial consumer maps (gmaps, ...) The street names often do not get rendered. They appear to have super low priority in the renderer, which makes sense when you consider that most use cases for them probably do not need street names. (Like "where to get döner?"

@twomikecharlie The behavior changes depending on location, zoom and viewport size, a common problem is that by dragging along a long street while keeping the zoom level at some positions no street name label is visible. Desktop is much better than mobile though. The consumer focus argument makes some sense, although I'd still be in trouble to find the direction to the döner place if I can't tell which part of an intersection is which road right after I got out of the subway (also happened to me).