Slope colors legend adapted to mountain hiking slopes

Started by ilopezc, July 11, 2022, 12:04:54 AM

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ilopezc

I have been using oruxmaps for long distance mountain hiking for several years now.

I always activate the route option "Colored path with slope" which helps a lot by letting you know at a glance the slope that is coming next, or the overall profile of the active route, just by looking at the colors of the route.

However, I find the range of slopes in the existing "Slope colors legend" (which ranges from -25% to +25%) as being very narrow for hiking use. In the mountains it is not uncommon to hike slopes up to +/-40% and even 50%, no need to be a climber to have to hike those!!!

I believe the legend that we have in Oruxmaps has probably been inspired in car or bike use. I guess we are many using Oruxmaps for hiking though.

In practical terms, while hiking you read the existing legend as follows:
1) All greens, yellows, oranges, light to medium blues: comfortable almost flat terrain.
2) Red: uphill, anything between an intermediate to an extremely demanding uphill slope.
3) Blue: downhill, anything between regular descent to a very steep dangerous descent.

As you see, a legend with 7 colors has only 3 practical meanings when applied to hiking.

I would propose two alternatives if we want to improve this legend:

1) To have more than one choice for "Slope colors legend", the extra hiking legend showing the same existing color range but applied to a wider range of slopes going from -40 to +40%.

2) If having to choose legends is technically complicated, we could just add extra colors at both ends of the scale: for the extreme uphill slopes, above 25%, black color; for extreme downhill slopes, under -25%, purple color.