[mkgmap-dev] Question to address search

Tue Mar 23 14:37:53 GMT 2010

WanMil wrote:
> 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?
>
> It would be good if you can put your current knowledge to the wiki.
>   
WanMil - My current knowledge (or at least 95% of it) is already on the 
wiki! That's the whole idea - to allow others to pick up on it and to 
join in. Most of my own contributions have been to the MDR file page and 
the SRT file page as you'll see from the 'history' tabs of both of them.

Please note that these pages are *not* wikipedia! Quite a bit of the 
information is highly speculative, there are great big missing bits and 
all we can say is that "this is the best we know so far".

You are right that the LBL, RGN and NET files have not even got pages 
started yet, though quite a bit is known about those file formats as 
mkgmap writes them. But writing those wiki pages takes time and effort. 
The primary authors of mkgmap are putting their work into actual coding 
(which is great) so it's up to others to get going on documentation.

My interest in MDR is because I'd like the address-searching features to 
work better than they do, and this is an aspect of mkgmap that isn't 
really written properly yet. Some of it works, and MDR files can be 
produced using mkgmap followed by mapsource. I'm trying to take 
mapsource out of the loop.

> Hopefully this will help to make progress to this long outstanding and 
> highly demanded feature.
>
>   

The more of us there are working on it, the better!
Steve