[OSM-talk] Language rendering query

[Vikas Yadav]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 14:00 +0800, D Tucny wrote:
> 2009/1/15 Vikas Yadav <vikas.yadav at threebrix.com>
>         Hi,
>         
>         I had two queries:
>         1) New Delhi text is not visible on low zooms (like 8) and is
>         only seem even after other smaller cities are shown. Please
>         suggest how to fix it. (I had put the same question on other
>         thread a while back with no response. :( 
> 
> http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=19.268965272384115&lon=77.80076850988954&zoom=4&layers=00000F0B0F
> It's showing up at zoom 4 there...

Mapnik is good but on TAH every other city is more important than the
capital of the country: 
http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=28.352079252718625&lon=77.80076850988954&zoom=8&layers=B0000F000F
(here you can see gurgaon is seen but the neighbour new delhi is not)
>  
>         2) Need to know how to show hindi translations on north indian
>         cities when they are rendered. I had put up a half dozen city
>         name:hi just yesterday. what else should be done so that
>         mapnik/tah start rendering the translations in the language?
>         (Just like shown in Sri Lanka/China/etc)
> 
> While it's useful to have the hindi name in name:hi, it may also be
> worthwhile putting it in name if the local language is officially
> hindi... If name currently contains an English name, that can be moved
> to name:en. 
I just tried a few experiments like for Gurgaon i just added hindi
(english) style to see how would it render.
I will check and follow your suggestions about trac ticket next
thursday.
> 
> I'm not sure however that there are suitable fonts on the mapnik tile
> server or tiles at home clients to correctly render hindi (the DejaVu
> font does not have full UTF8 coverage), so making this change may
> result in names not being visible on the map until this problem is
> corrected... (Right now non-latin rendering on tiles at home is pretty
> haphazard as some clients have suitable fonts for some languages and
> others don't, Mapnik didn't used to support glyph fallback, so any
> characters not present in DejaVu were rendered as squares, it now
> supports glyph fallback however and the server seems to have a
> reasonable range of fonts available which means that it's consistent
> rendering of non-latin scripts has suddenly overtaken tiles at home in
> this regard)... If you find that hindi does not render correctly on
> the Mapnik layer, it would likely be useful to raise a trac ticket
> with some suggestions of free/open fonts that could be installed on
> the server to make this wor k...
>  
> d

Thanks!
Vikas