[mkgmap-dev] codepage for greece

Tue Aug 4 19:11:52 BST 2009

Hi Marco,

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 04:02:00PM +0200, dom Team OiD wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm successfully creating  full europe  mapsets, but I  have problems 
> with the code pages.
> Whih code page can be used that fits all character for europe languages?
> Is there any? How do you solve this problem?

To my knowledge, the only code that can display (accented) Latin, Cyrillic
and Greek at the same time is Unicode.  Some Garmin devices should support
UTF-8, but the Edge 705 is not one of them.  It understands the encoding
but displays the codes as if they were latin1, e.g., two or three characters
per non-ASCII character.

> eg for greece I always get "??????" in city names.

As far as I understand, IBM/Microsoft Code Page 1253 is the Greek 8-bit
character set.

If you are using GNU/Linux or similar (Cygwin or MSYS on Windows), and
your terminal emulator is set up for the UTF-8 encoding, you can play
with commands like this:

echo -e '\xc4\r'|recode cp1251..utf8
(this will display the Cyrillic D)
echo -e '\xc4\r'|recode cp1252..utf8
(this will display the latin A with two dots above)
echo -e '\xc4\r'|recode cp1253..utf8
(this will display the Greek D)

A possible hack that I have mentioned earlier is to map Greek characters
to Cyrillic or vice versa and to drop accents of Latin characters.  Then
you should be able to use CP1251 or CP1253 for all of Europe.  I haven't
ever tried using anything else than CP1252 (--latin1), though.

Best regards,

	Marko