[OSM-talk] international name rendering

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Torsdag 24. mai 2007 skreiv Stefan Baebler:
>I second the proposal for depreciation.

Me too.

> name (default, local name)+name:LC (language-code specific) seems the way 
> to go.

But this makes the assumption the there *is* a default, local name, which is 
not always true.

Let me mention an example. In Norway, we have two official written languages, 
Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk, with ISO 639-1 language codes 'nb' 
and 'nn', respectively. Luckily, all street and place names exist in only one 
version (which really is language code 'no', for Norwegian, and may be closer 
to Bokmål, or Nynorsk, or just a spoken dialect), so we only need to 
just 'name' for these.

But amenities, museums and other non-road places may have several official 
names (one in Norwegian Bokmål, one in Norwegian Nynorsk and one in English, 
and perhaps even one in French or German). In fact, I have just tagged such a 
museum. It would be very artificial to say that one of these names is 
the 'official' name, and use 'name' for it:

name=foo
name:nb=bar
name:en=baz

And besides, we would lose information on which language it is in (in this 
case 'nn'). So I have instead used

name:nn=foo
name:nb=bar
name:en=baz

This is currently not rendered by either Mapnik or Osmarender. I would expect 
the English named to be rendered. And when generating a custom map 
in 'Norwegian Nynorsk', I would prefer names to be rended with the following 
priorities:

name:nn
name:no
name:nb
int_name (but this should be deprecated)
name:en-GB
name:en
name

The reason for English to take priority over just 'name', is that many place 
names will probably not be translated to Norwegian in OSM. For a Norwegian 
person, the English name 'Nepal' will be much more familiar than the official 
name, 'नेपाल'.

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer