[Talk-in] Hello! and offline OSM maps for India in Hindi

[Anish Mangal]

Hi,

This is my first email to this list so here's a short introduction

I am a free-software and open-education volunteer mainly working on
the XSCE[1][2] (short for School Server Community Edition) project. I've
volunteered for the OLPC project[3] from 2010-2014 and worked in the
field in Paraguay and Uruguay, and helped develop the Australian
version of  OLPC's OS.

At XSCE, we are a active global volunteer community working to foster
grassroots learning and education in the remotest corners of the
world. Right now our model of implementation is to have offline
content-loaded servers hosted in schools and villages providing access
to media and collaboration tools. If there is internet connectivity,
the server becomes a gateway. We have pilots in Haiti, India, Ghana,
Nepal and a few other places.

-----

Coming to the subject, as part of the XSCE content distribution, we
include OSM tiles for offline usage. Lately, I was experimenting with
generating tiles specific to India, there were a few issues:

- Kashmir, and other disputed borders.
- Maps localized in Hindi, or other Indian languages.

So, with the help of the OSM community (including Arun, who pointed me
to this list), I was able to work around those issues. The notes are
documented here.

http://xsce.org/wiki/generating_map_tiles

A temporary rendering server is here

http://home.braddock.com:28112/osm/slippymap.html

If anyone's interested I can post the links to download the rendered
tiles when the rendering is complete upto zoom level 17. Currently at
zoom level 16.

There are still some issues I will work towards. The hindi fonts in
general seem a bit smaller than their english counterparts, and the idea
to use transliteration to convert tags for there is no hindi translation.

Anyway, thought I'd share with the list, and also leave a pointer to the
XSCE project. We hope to begin many new deployments in India, Bhutan,
Nepal, Nicaragua & Haiti over the next 6 months working with various
volunteer groups.

[1] http://xsce.org  (wip frontpage)
[2] http://schoolserver.org (ugly wiki) :-)
[3] http://laptop.org

Cheers,
Anish