News

Crash on compiling recent south american OSM maps.

A recent change to data in Columbia, South America in Open Street Map may cause a problem when creating a map of that area.

There is a long standing bug in mkgmap that results in a crash when compiling the object http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/313259878 which is in Columbia. The addr:housenumber is ":702" which triggers the bug. Probably that is just a typo and it should be just "702", however this should not cause a crash in mkgmap.

The problem is now fixed in r3354, so you should upgrade if affected by this problem. I think you will only see it if using the --add-pois-to-areas option.

Due to the nature of the fix, the resulting .img files may be a little smaller than before.

Unicode searching. Now you can.

For quite some time it has been possible to build a map using unicode to display characters in various languages.

Now searching should also work in versions r3294 and later.

All of Western, Central and Eastern European characters should be available as well as Arabic, Greek and various others. It is unlikely to work with Chinese characters and that will require further investigation.

Ensure that you are using the options --code-page=65001 --index --route as well any others that you need.

Quoting variable filter arguments

You can now quote the argument to a variable filter in a style file.

A simple contrived example:

# Fix short form and mis-spelling
highway=residential { set name '${name|subst:"(Raod|Rd)~>Road"}' ; }

For backward compatibility you do not have to do this and all existing styles should work as they are. However I would recommend that you start to quote all arguments that are more complex than a simple word. Before this change it was impossible to use a pipe symbol within a regular expression since it would be seen as the start of the next filter.

Improved splitter

Splitter now has a new split algorithm that usually results in fewer, more evenly sized tiles.

The test generator is > 10 times faster. This allows a deeper search for good splits. A few errors where fixed which sometimes prohibited to find a good split, but also sometimes helped to find one.

A new option --search-limit can be used to increase/decrease the amount of time the splitter tries to find a good split. The larger the input file the higher this value should be. For planet, --search-limit=1000000 is okay, --search-limit=10000000 is better.

Splitter version r385

Version r385 of splitter is a large update.

All the dependent libraries have been upgraded to later versions, so make sure that you install the complete package. This might affect you if you don't download the complete distribution or install in some unusual way.

A summary of the visible changes follows:

• Improved error handling: most I/O errors like corrupted or missing files will now stop the program instead of just printing error messages, and producing a useless result
• Working with pbf files is faster because of the updated libraries.
• Splitting large files is faster because of some improvements in the branch
• Lots of internal changes in the code.