[OSM-talk] [OSM-newbies] avoid repeating the name tag twice

[Michel Barakat]

We're facing a similar issue for mapping in neighboring Lebanon. In
addition to English, we use Arabic and French so we end up having four
name tags: 'name', 'name:en', 'name:fr', 'name:ar'
The name tag is a duplicate of one of the three languages depending on
the road or POI in question, we have some POIs with English names,
French or Arabic, not accounting for some two of three other languages
used in certain areas. Similarly to the example of Belgium, canceling
the 'name' tag all together, and defaulting to the country language is
not suitable. Language should be set per element.

> But I prefer not to enter the same name twice, but to "point" the name tag to the name:lang.
I support the idea of not having to repeat twice the same name. It is
an extra cost that might incur additional unnecessary risk of error
when creating or modifying the tags.

> A possibility would be to never use name=, but only name:XX=xxxx and
> have a tag name:local=XX in order to indicate which is the local one.
> For rendering, a default rule could be that if there is only one
> name:XX=xxx without name:local=... then it will use the name:XX whatever
> XX is.
Good idea but we should make sure that name:local=XX is correct, that
is 'name:xx' exists among the possible name choices. Otherwise you
will end up with inconsistency. In terms of deployment, I don't think
the community will approve canceling the 'name' tag completely.

So an alternative plausible solution could be to have a mechanism
which refers to one of the name:xx, such as Tal has suggested. We
could agree on some escape character that is used inside the tag
content ($ or \ or whatever is not commonly used). We would have
something like that:
name=$(name:fr)
name:fr="French Here"
name:en="English Here"
name:ar="Arabic Here"

Another possibility, which looks more like a hack, is to simply
describe the language of the 'name' tag. So we could have a tag
'name:local=xx' describing the language of the 'name' tag. For the
same example above, it would look like that:
name="French Here"
name:local="fr"
name:en="English Here"
name:ar="Arabic Here"

In that case, we would not need the 'name:fr' tag to be explicitly
expressed. The rendered though would need to be modified to realize
its existence.

Cheers
Michel

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Tal <tal.bav at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Pierre-André Jacquod
> <pjacquod at alumni.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>
>> > I would, however, like to set a default language to the renderer using
>> >     name=$(name:he)
>> > or something equivalent, for the default international map on the osm
>> > site.
>> I am not aware of such a feature for the current tools. I fear a problem
>> could be that $(name:he) is also a valid name somewhere else in the
>> world (with an other font than Latin...)
>
>
> I believe otherwise. I think that in the age of unicode "$(name:he)" will
> always be the same, regardless of the font you use, as long as you stick to
> unicode. I believe that this site uses utf-8 which is a unicode encoding.
> Therefore, "$(name:he)" will always be a dollar sign and  parenthesis around
> some Latin letters.
>
>>

>
>
> I like this idea!
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