[mkgmap-dev] mixed index branch merge

Sat Feb 14 19:45:10 GMT 2015

On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 03:57:21PM +0100, Colin Smale wrote:
>What about multi-lingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland?

Or multi-lingual cities, such as Montréal in Canada?

But, is this really an issue? Street signs may be in two or more 
languages, saying "Foo Street" and "Rue Foo" for example. Can anyone 
name a multi-lingual area where a stopword in one language would be a 
non-stopword in the other language?

For example, could there be a highway=* with name="Rue Street" in a 
French/English area? I would not think so.

For what it is worth, there are a lot of bilingual street signs in 
Finland, using Finnish (name:fi), Swedish (name:sv) or in the north, 
Sámi (name:se). It depends on the share of the minority population 
whether multiple languages are used. The majority language appears first 
in the signs. So, usually it is Finnish first, then Swedish, or Swedish 
first, then Finnish. Sometimes the signs could be Finnish or Swedish 
only.

>How about this (sorry the abbreviations are wrong but it is only to 
>illustrate my point):
>
>mkgmap:country=POL {set mkgmap:lang=polish;}

AFAIU, your suggestion wrongly assumes that only one language will be 
used in a given region. And I think it should be based on administrative 
regions, not necessarily countries.

How would you represent an area that has multiple official languages 
that can appear on street signs? I think that the OSM convention would 
be something like this:

{ set mkgmap:lang:fi=yes; mkgmap:lang:sv=yes; }
or the (more tricky for our style rules)
{ set mkgmap:lang='fi;sv' }

>If the stopwords were also defined to be regular expressions, then it 
>could also handle prefixes and suffixes as well as whole words.

I agree that defining stopwords as regular expressions would provide 
some necessary flexibility. Like someone said, we do not want to omit 
Straße (or other stopwords) at the start of a street name in languages 
that usually put the stopword at the end of the name. But, in French and 
Spanish the stopword is always at the start of the name. An anchored 
regexp (\<Straße$ or ^Calle\>) would nicely express this.

Maybe the regexp could also facilitate a rewriting system for 
abbreviating the index entries, such as replacing "street" with "st" in 
English, "Straße" with "Str" in German, "puiestee" with "pst" in 
Estonian, "katu" with "k" in Finnish and so on.

	Marko