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Scale sections in style sheets

You will nearly always want your maps to look different at different scales. Some objects will not appear at some scales, and other will be drawn very differently. For example, minor roads may not appear at small scales, and city names may be suppressed or drawn as a faint overlay at large scales.

The easiest way to make this happen is to use <scale> sections:

<scale min='m' max='n'>
    ...
</scale>

with any balanced XML you like inside them.

You can omit either the min or max attribute. Omitted attributes are inherited from the enclosing section; the outermost section implicitly has no upper or lower limit. The min and max values are the denominators of the scale fractions, and the interval is half-open: for example, <scale min='10000' max='50000'> covers the range from 1:10,000, up to but not including 1:50,000.

Here is an example of nested <scale> sections:

<scale min='25000'>
	<layer name='place'>
	<label font-size='200m,12pt,24pt' font-weight='bold' color='darkslategrey' glow='white' glowWidth='7%,1' case='title' priority='1' wrapWidth='6em'/>

		<condition test='Type#FFFF0000=cit'>
		<label color='black' priority='0'/>
		</condition>

		<scale max='50000'>
			<condition test='Type#FFFF0000=tow'/>
		</scale>

		<scale max='200000'>
			<condition test='Type#FFFF0000=vil'/>
		</scale>

		<scale max='100000'>
			<condition test='Type#FFFF0000=sub'/>
		</scale>

		<scale max='50000'>
			<condition test='Type#FFFF0000=ham'/>
		</scale>
	</layer>
</scale>

If you use <scale> as a single tag without any content, ending in /> (for example, <scale max='50000'/>), it affects the enclosing <layer> or <condition>. That format exists only to support older style sheets, and should be avoided.