[OSM-dev] [mapnik] GSoC - Improving support for non-latin languages in mapnik

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

Le Thu, 31 May 2012 01:59:18 +0200,
Hermann Kraus <hermr2d2 at googlemail.com> a écrit :

> I'd like to introduce my summer of code project "Improving support for
> non-latin languages in mapnik"
> 
> A complete description and a process report are available at
> http://mapnik.org/news/2012/05/29/gsoc2012/
> 
> I'm still looking for test cases. So if you know a place where
> rendering goes wrong please inform me.

I haven't looked in details, but I guess many of the maps generated by
MapOSMatic (http://www.maposmatic.org) for Arabic contraries and
Hebrew-speaking countries are probably affected by this problem.

For the street index part of MapOSMatic, we are using the Pango library
to do this kind of work, and it normally handles all the "problems"
that you can face with RTL languages, and also things like ligatures in
Arabic. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage Pango rather than
reinventing the same (rather complicated) logic?

Though not related to non-latin languages support, we would also like
to see wrapping being used to render texts along lines, and not only
texts rendered around a point. Our major complaint in MapOSMatic right
now is the fact that when a street is too small, its name is not
printed. Being able to wrap street names, or even turn them into a
point text nearby the street would definitely be nice. See for example
http://bentobako.org/tmp/annotated-map.png which highlights those two
cases (from a map not rendered with Mapnik).

We will anyway definitely be testing newer versions of Mapnik that
improve the text rendering.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni                http://thomas.enix.org
MapOSMatic                      http://www.maposmatic.org
Logiciels Libres à Toulouse     http://www.toulibre.org
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