Key:osmarender:nameDirection
 osmarender:nameDirection
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| Description |
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Used to provide a rendering hint for street names to Osmarender 
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| Group: annotations |
| Used on these elements |
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| Status: discardable |
| Tools for this tag |
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osmarender:nameDirection is a rendering hint tag for the Osmarender software, telling it which direction to draw the name of road.
Discardable tag
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This tag should never be used, and is "discardable". |
This was added to list of discardable tags in JOSM (code) in iD (code) in March 2019, meaning the tag will automatically get removed as people touch the data. There has also been a proposed mechanical edit to remove all instances (discussion)
The reason is that this tag does not provide generally useful data, only instructions for a specific software. These days such tagging practice is generally avoided. What's more the osmarender software is little-used and unmaintained.
Original name direction rendering hint
The old use of this tag was as a rendering hint related to the direction of name text rendered on roads. By default Osmarender will draw street names left-to-right along ways. It uses the longitude (horizontal position) of the start and end points of the way to determine the direction. In some cases, for example, very winding roads, the automatically chosen name direction is not ideal. In this case the way could be tagged with osmarender:nameDirection=-1 or osmarender:nameDirection=1 as a hint to tell Osmarender which way to draw the name.