[mkgmap-dev] Improving mkgmap's Unicode transliteration

Fri Aug 28 20:29:02 BST 2009

2009/8/12 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com>:
> I'm going to Greece tomorrow and I noticed to my dismay that mkgmap's
> transliteration tables for the Greek alphabet were totally missing.
>
> So I hacked up a small Perl script which uses the Unicode::UCD and the
> Text::Unidecode modules to fillin the blanks:
>
>    avar at aoeu:~/src/mkgmap/resources/chars/ascii$ perl
> re-transliterate.pl < row03.trans > row03.trans.tmp && mv
> row03.trans.tmp row03.trans
>
> The script and a patch to row03.trans which Works For Me are attached.
> But of course the tool can also be run on the rest of the files to
> fill in more blanks.
>
> And my script can of course be modified a bit further to spit out
> transliterations for files not yet in mkgmap row* files.
>
> I don't know what the row* files were originally based on but there's
> a lot of prior art for transliterating Unicode and there's no need to
> redo all this work for mkgmap. The Unicode Consortium has published
> transliteration tables (which Text::Unidecode is largely based on),
> it's much easier to use stuff like that rather than doing all the work
> yourselves.
>
> Anyway, off to pack for my flight.

I see that my patch has been applied:
http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/svn/wsvn/mkgmap/resources/chars/ascii/?op=revision&rev=1154

But really what I'm more interesting in is where mkgmap's
transliteration database comes from. Knowing that will help with
further contributions. There's a lot more that can be done than just
improving row03.trans. That was just a sample improvement that I
needed at that time.