[mkgmap-dev] Re: Questions related to practical usage of MKGMAP

Thu Jul 2 10:09:39 BST 2009

On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 09:30:30AM +0100, Dermot McNally wrote:
> 2009/7/2 Toby Speight <T.M.Speight.90 at cantab.net>:
> 
> > That's not the best way to do a case-insensitive test - the reason being
> > that in some languages (e.g. French, I think) upper case letters have no
> > accents.  So "Ecole" should match "école" (again, excuse my poor French
> > if necessary!).  Also, in German, "Straße" should match "STRASSE".
> 
> Your point probably still stands (for the German case anyway, where
> you also need to regard, say, ae as equivalent to ä), but French does
> now place accents on uppercase letters.

Actually, the conversion to upper case also depends on the locale.
Here is how: Turkish uses both a dotted i and a dotless I, both in
upper and lower case.  In most other locales, the upper-case variant of i
is I, but not in Turkish.  Also, comparing upper-case strings would not
solve all issues.  For example, in Swedish and Finnish, v and w are
sometimes sorted at the same position.

I'm not sure if these examples really matter that much when comparing
common names.  For proper names, there may be alternative spellings
(such as old Finnish names containing W instead of V), but common names,
such as station or hotel, should use a uniform spelling.

Perhaps this could best be addressed by writing explicit rules for all
the possible spellings and abbreviations (if they have been used contrary
to advice).  E.g., Straße, Strasse, Str.; Bahnhof, Hauptbahnhof, Hbf.

One last word: instead of editing the name tags (with things like
default_name or prefixing or affixing "station"), I would rather include
the TYP file information in the mkgmap style definition.  As far as I know,
labels cannot be multilingual in the Garmin format except in the TYP file.
Doing something about this is on my long-term TODO list.

	Marko