please excuse if this has already been discussed before, I’m sure this must have been discussed, but I couldn’t find a solution yet.
I’m happily using Lambertus’ wonderful service to install maps into my Basecamp or Mapsource, and then later on transfer them to one of my devices (60CSx, 276C, Montana).
So I recently download tiles for Tunisia, as I’ll be travelling Tunisia again in 2014.
But the many arabic names (towns, street names, POIs) don’t get displayed in a readable manner.
Example:
Sidi Bou Said (a small town nearby Tunis): In Basecamp displayed as “Sydy Bws `Yd”
Or: Who can guess what “Ql`@ ?L’Ndls” shall mean ???
OSM online maps show these arabic towns using arabic characters (which I can’t read at all)
This makes the Tunisian maps almost unusable in the Garmin world.
I have tried installing the Lambertus maps using either “Generic Routable” or “Generic Routable (testing new style)”, with or without the Mapnik TYP file.
No difference.
That’s a good catch Chris, I think Lambertus should add name:fr to the list?
The problem is that all characters are transliterated into ASCII in order to display it right on the older Garmin units as well (they cannot display arabic, not even lower case!). And I dont know if mkgmap is capable of detecting if the name tag is in Arabic to display it in Arabic because transliteration here makes no sense at all anyway, better a correct name on the map in Basecamp/Mapsource and ??? on the device than rubbish like Ql`@ ?L’Ndls on both screens.
These are limitation of mkgmap. You can use codepage 1252 or ASCI and get transliteration for Arabic, which usually isn’t readable or you can use UTF-8 for proper names but search functionality won’t work correctly.
Thanks for spotting the problem and suggesting a solution. I added name:fr to the name-tag list and an update is running. Should be available by Friday.
I’ve now added this rule to the style files to get the French names rendered in the following countries (MAR|TUN|DZA|ESH|MRT|LBY).
Lambertus, can you remove name:fr name-tag list?