Leafleftjs - OpenstreetMap : Bring road names on top of Overlay layers

Question

I am new to OpenstreetMap and Leafletjs. I am trying to implement a map displaying journey time information on motorways (also called highways in some part of the world) by using different colors to show road congestion and the problem I'm facing is, once the map tiles are rendered, it comes with all information, like town/city names, road names etc. On the basis of road information that I receive, I create road colorings in an overlay that sits on top of the tile layer. The problem is, once that happens, the road colorings cover the road names that appear on the tile layer. The problem can be seen in the image displayed below.

Is there a way, I could extract the road names so that I could put it in a layer above the road coloring layer so that road names appear on top of road colorings.

Thanks for any sort of help, Looking forward to some replies.

Thanks

Answer 1

In theory, you could create two sets of tiles: one with the road lines, another with the shields (labels). Render the shields tiles with a transparent background. Then hack Leaflet around to have a second tile layer above the overlay layer.

However... that's a whole bunch of hassle for a fairly simple problem. So: why not render the road numbers alongside the roads, rather than on top of them? That way, your overlay line won't obscure the numbers. Here's an example of a style that does this (disclaimer: my site!).

Assuming you're using Mapnik to render your tiles, you'll want to use TextSymbolizer rather than ShieldSymbolizer. Customising the style is (of course) much easier if you're using TileMill rather than pure Mapnik XML.