[mkgmap-dev] mixed index branch merge

Sun Feb 15 15:42:47 GMT 2015

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 01:02:37AM +0100, Colin Smale wrote:
>>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.....

Is there an administrative area where both Welsh and Dutch or French are 
used in street name signs? I would not expect so.

>>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.

Right, this suggestion should be a reasonable default, if it is 
selectable by any admisitrative level (such as country, state, province 
or municipality).

>>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 do not think that it is always a reasonable assumption. Most areas in 
Finland use Finnish as the primary official language. For some places or 
streets in a Swedish-speaking area there could exist Finnish names, but 
maybe the Finnish-speaking minority is so small that the signs are only 
in Swedish. It could be more useful to have the street names in the same 
language on the map as you have on the signs. Only if the street signs 
displayed each language, it would make more sense to let the user to 
override the primary language (name=* labels) at map translation time.

Similarly, when travelling in former Finnish-language areas that were 
made part of the Soviet Union, it could be more useful to have the 
current Russian names on the map, because the street signs would not be 
in Finnish any more.

>I can't imagine someone wanting all the languages in the map at the 
>same time. Can the Garmin format even handle that?

AFAIU, only the Garmin NT format (which mkgmap does not support) allows 
you to define labels in multiple languages.

	Marko