[OSM-dev] osmarender patch - Better support for non-english/multi-lang areas

[Tal]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Dave Stubbs <osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk> wrote:
> Don't encourage people to try to insert random crap in free form tags
> such as name.

It is no more crap than your answer ;) It is an attempt to offer a
better solution to a serious problem in some parts of the map.
I agree that this might be considered as a temporary solution since,
as I see it, at the end there will be no "name" tag. It is simply not
flexible enough for a multi language project. For that, a lot of tools
will have to change, or a common preprocessor agreed upon.
Until then, this is the lesser evil.

> Most people dealing with this will just print it and
> it'll look stupid.

You may be right. That is a disadvantage. But as we don't tag for the
renderer, we definitely do not tag for "Most people dealing with
this".
I know it might look like this a classic tagging for the renderer (I
already said that my problem is only with the slippy map on the osm
site),
 but this is not the case. It is purely to have better data quality.
The best - and in fact the only reasonable - way to store Hebrew names
in a multi lingual map of Israel is using the name:he tag.
Currently we depend upon the slippy map. We tag, we see it rendered,
we fix problems, add missing street names, fight about naming
conventions etc.
The map is steadily improving (with the natural focus upon hebrew
names, but not only). The problems is that we are basing our all our
work on the name tags, which DO contain random crap. Sometimes they
also contain English, sometime Hebrew and transliteration, sometimes
just English, and most of the time Hebrew. A computer script can't
automatically go back from the "name" tags to the "name:he" tags. So
as a result, we have lesser quality data - We have no idea what the
name:he tags contain, because we do not see them, and the improvement
to the name tags can't automatically go back to the name:he tags.
This is the disturbing situation which I want to make a little better.


> Find some other way of doing this.
> Several perfectly good ones were suggested on the recent thread.

I've mainly seen my proposal, copy-paste in the editor and name:local=XX.
Maybe I've missed something?
Are you referring to the  name:local=XX  ? This is OK by me, but less
intuitive to the mapper, since one needs to remember a new tag. And,
old tools will have NO name tags with this solution, so it'll be just
a little better then using name tags with garbage. Think driving
instructions with no name tags...