OpenStreetMap Forum

athlon02

Member

Registered: 2008-10-23

Posts: 6

Asian characters displayed as rectangles in Mapnik tiles

I created tiles of the entire world using the Mapnik wiki for reference.  I created them using a RHEL5 box.  But, for some reason the Asian names are rendered as rectangles.  Any tiles with Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. render just fine, but not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc.  I've tried recompiling Mapnik from the latest (0.5.1) source but no success.

Anyone know why the characters are not rendered correctly?  Font issue?  Database issue? Something else?

Thanks,
Kevin

emj

Member

From: .se (59.3N17.99E) 0735969076

Registered: 2006-06-18

Posts: 949

Re: Asian characters displayed as rectangles in Mapnik tiles

You need the right font including support for all these in one font set, since mapnik only had support for using one font last time I heard something. (Note: I'm not saying the font name, but if you google for fallback font  mapnik site:lists.openstreetmap.org you might find it.)

Last edited by emj (2008-11-11 23:46:51)

athlon02

Member

Registered: 2008-10-23

Posts: 6

Re: Asian characters displayed as rectangles in Mapnik tiles

Looks like it was an issue with the DejaVu font.  I copied AR PL ShangHeiSun Uni to /usr/local/lib/mapnik/fonts.  Then I changed "DejaVu Serif Book" to "AR PL ShangHeiSun Uni Regular" in my osm.xml.  That did the trick.

Hopefully that tidbit will help others!

-- Kevin

emj

Member

From: .se (59.3N17.99E) 0735969076

Registered: 2006-06-18

Posts: 949

Re: Asian characters displayed as rectangles in Mapnik tiles

Cool, thanks for the report.