[mkgmap-dev] mixed index branch merge

Sun Feb 15 00:02:37 GMT 2015

On 2015-02-14 20:45, Marko Mäkelä wrote:

> 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?

"de" is "the" in Dutch, "of" in French - both (candidate) stopwords in 
their own way, but you would want different rules for keeping or 
omitting "de" in street names.

It also means "South" in Welsh, which you probably would not want to 
omit in most cases.....

> 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.

I intended to suggest that each area would have a single "default" 
language. Main reason is to select the correct stopword treatment in the 
absence of explicit name:xx tags. In most cases roads are just tagged 
with "name=*" - so this mechanism would define the mapping of "name" to 
a language. Then you only need a single stopword treatment for the 
language, which can be shared by all territories which use that 
language.

> 
> 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' }

Well, I assume that the maps produced by mkgmap are targeted to a 
language (or ordered list of languages) chosen by the mkgmap user. I 
can't imagine someone wanting all the languages in the map at the same 
time. Can the Garmin format even handle that?

> 
>> 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
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