[mkgmap-dev] character repertoires

Sat Feb 23 21:47:24 GMT 2013

On 13-02-19 22:04:14 CET, Steve Ratcliffe wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> On 13/02/13 20:04, Robert Joop wrote:
> >There is support for a number of character sets in mkgmap, but do we have
> >any collected wisdom about what character repertoires are supported on
> >our devices?
> >While at the hack weekend, I tried some latin2 on my new device and was
> >pleasantly surprised that “šř” appeared in a street name – on my old
> >GPSmap 60CSx with the very same gmapsupp.img, I see them as what looks
> >like “.Ø” on the map and “◊Ø” in the tooltip when hovering over it.
> 
> I hoped someone would reply with a detailed answer!  I'm not an
> expert on the different devices.  I am sure that the 'old' devices
> such as the Legend Cx and ones of that era, only supported the one
> character set. There may have been different versions sold in

… with “the one” being CP1252 and not ASCII, fortunately.
It actually is the CP1252 superset of ISO 8859-1, I see the printable
characters in the range 128–159 (which ISO 8859 reserves for a second
set of control characters).

Funny difference: code pages 125x all have the double dagger U+2021 ‡
on position 87, and most maps with these code pages show the “‡”.
Only the map with CP1252 differs, it shows “++” instead!
Is it the Garmin’s fault, or can mkgmap be the reason?
Same for the Euro sign U+20AC €: CP1252 shows “Eu” at its position
0x80, while the other maps having it at the same position show the
“€”.

The micro sign U+00B5 μ becomes a ? on most code page maps, except for
the Greek one, even though it is at the same position in all code pages.

> different regions with different character sets. But the standard
> European one was code-page 1252 of course.
> 
> Newer devices seem to support a number of character sets. I have
> verified that my Nuvi 1490 can do Arabic script (code page 1256)
> for example. I would guess that it includes many/all of the western
> European from Greek to Cyrillic.

While I wouldn’t consider Greek and Cyrillic to be western European ;-),
the Montana supports them.

Interestingly, I get to see Arabic characters (CP1256), but not any
Hebrew characters (CP1255).
And in the Arabic map’s upper half, the latin based characters show up
as “?”.

Another peculiar thing: while the Garmin does its usual wierd
upper/lower casing, TWO LABELS ARE ALL CAPS, namely those containing
the ª feminine and º masculine ordinal indicators.

> I believe it is still true that only devices sold in Asia are capable of
> Chinese/Japanese etc. characters - although you can download
> replacement firmware that includes them from Garmin.

Asian:
A map with CP1258 shows up with totally unlabeled streets, not even
anything from the ASCII range.
As for CP874, the U+0Exx characters in the code page’s upper half do
not show up, but the ASCII half looks complete.
I haven’t tried any of the larger Asian code pages.

rj