[mkgmap-dev] Question to address search

Thu Mar 18 20:30:19 GMT 2010

> Hi Steve,
>
> I have just started to have a look on the internals of the garmin 
> fileformat. The wiki 
> (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Format) tells me 
> that there are the formats
> TRE
> NOD
> MDR
> SRT
> GMP
> DEM
>
> The documentation of the garmin-img sourceforge project also mentions 
> the formats not yet documented in the wiki:
> LBL
> RGN
> NET
>
> I think LBL is the file in which the labels are stored in a non 
> searchable format. And MDR contains the same information like LBL but it 
> is searchable. Am I right?
>
>   
I don't know the internal format of the subfiles. But here is my overall 
understanding of the files.
As far as I know, LBL contains labels for each map object. Its like a 
list of strings. Each map object points with an index to an entry of the 
LBL file.

The MDR works the oposite direction. It contains chopped and sorted 
fragments of adress data, optimized for searching and  input auto 
completion with least effort.
The result is an index into the map object lists (or a coordinate?).

So yes, it contains more or less the same data, but the using is different.