[OSM-talk] international name rendering

[David Earl]

While rendering national variations in names may be reasonable in the short
term, I don't think it is a good longer term solution. And giving priority
to English as the second language when there are multiple name:whatever, as
was suggested, is a rather biased approach.

Here's another approach that gives other benefits as well (some of you will
have seen this before). I know this is much harder than a change in
rendering, which is why I'm describing it as long term.

- render the map areas, ways and street names as at present, but leave off
all node-related and otherwise "horizontally" rendered text and all icons.
(This should mean compressed tiles are smaller in general.)

- render a separate overlay (maybe more than one) map tile as html (or maybe
some alternate format - perhaps more compact - that javascript can
understand), which includes label text and icons. (Do it by tile, and take
zoom into consideration, not try to render from the database, which would be
chronically slow; and by tile relative pixel coordinates and absolute
positions).

This then means that text and icons are independent but rapidly output
entities. They can be panned as per the map images straightforwardly enough.

But the key thing is that by judicious use of styles, one can dynamically
turn on or off items according to user preference. So in the context of this
discussion, one could have a "French" layer in preference to an English
layer (where name:fr is selected for display if it exists, in preference to
just name); or a layer that includes schools (icons and names) or not, or
mountain peaks or not, etc, to get the information the user wants to see
without the map looking too cluttered.

It's also a way of dealing with those short streets with long names that
won't fit - put them in the text/icon layer as horizontal text (mind you,
they could be rendered into the tile like this in any case).

This doesn't address street names in multiple languages, but that is rarer
than multilingual place names. But it is symmetrical for all languages at
least for the text/icon layer.

David