[mkgmap-dev] Upper / lower case names

Tue Jan 22 14:05:02 GMT 2013

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 01:59:55PM +0100, Wolfgang Hammel wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I was observing that that capitalized names on eg. buildings like "VW"
>etc. show up in upper and lower case on my Oregon 550.
>So I played around and tried some different combinations of upper /
>lower case names.
>
>Here is the outcome on the Oregon:
>
>"name"         "name"
>in OSM     ->  on Oregon 550
>
>"ABC"      ->  "Abc"
>"ABC D"    ->  "Abc D"
>"ABCd"     ->  "ABCd"
>"ABC De"   ->  "ABC De"
>"ABC d"    ->  "ABC d"
>"ABC DE"   ->  "Abc De"
>"ABC dE"   ->  "ABC dE"
>
>So it seems as if when there were only upper case letters in a name, the
>name shown on the GPS device is modified such that only the first letter
>of each word stays uppercase. If there is a least one lower case letter
>in the name it is shown as it was originally in the OSM-data.
>
>Is this a firmware "feature" of the Oregon or is this depending on the
>map-generation via mkgmap?
>
>Command line for mkgmap was
>
>java -Xmx1300M -ea -jar mkgmap.jar --latin1 --lower-case ...
>
>however, omitting the --lower-case option doesn't change the outcome.

For what it is worth, some devices (such as the Edge 705) can show 
lower-case letters in non-rotated labels (such as POI labels), but not 
in the vector font that is used for displaying street names. If you use 
--lower-case, then the street names would show A?? instead of Abc.

I seem to remember that there are some escape codes for forcing 
upper-case or lower-case in upper-case labels. So that you could avoid 
"VW" or "III" becoming "Vw" or "Iii" in labels. I may have seen this in 
cGPSmapper documentation some years ago. I never tried it out.

	Marko