[OSM-talk] Languages

[Tal]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Stephan Plepelits <
skunk at xover.htu.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 04:36:58PM +0300, Tal wrote:
> > Regarding the "official language", or more precisely, which of the
> available
> > languages to use, I've always felt that this is a rendering issue, sort
> of. I
> > mean, that this is a higher level knowledge that should be an input to
> the
> > rendering software, in addition to the osm db, much like the rule file.
> This
> > new knowledge, which might reside in the rule file, should not be a part
> of the
> > osm db.
> I'm totally with you, it should be a thing for the renderer. But ... if you
> don't know in which language the name-tag is in, it's hard to decide which
> language to take.


Here, I totally agree with you. That's why it should be strongly encouraged
to ALWAYS tag what language a name tag is in. But there is no need to
introduce a new tag for this (I did tried to suggest it once, as a temporary
workaround, not as the ultimate solution).


>
> An example. I want a German map, but when there are no German names I'd
> prefer English ones.
>
> No you encounter a street:
> name=Bergstrasse
> name:en=Mountain Road


When you tag names without specifying the language, you get yourself into
troubles. why not tag as:
   name:de=Bergstrasse
   name:en=Mountain Road


>
> Which text do you print on the map? I think we need a way to tell the
> renderer which language(s) are used for the name, ref, desc, ...-tags.
> And actually I don't see a political problem, because it just adds some
> additional information about something which is already there.


I agree that's nothing political, and there is some information missing. You
propose to add this information in the following way:
   name=Bergstrasse
   name:en=Mountain Road
   local_language_used_in_name_tags=de

I think it complicates things without a goog reason. I solve it as I've
shown above:
   name:de=Bergstrasse
   name:en=Mountain Road


>
>
> And in cases where you have several languages in the name-tag you should
> use the same order for the language-tag. (That doesn't have to imply any
> "importance" or what-so-ever).


I'd like to draw some attention to http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/1643
It adds a "preferedLanguages" parameter to osmrenderer rule file (or as a
command line option):

 assume preferedLanguages=":en,:de,,:he"

 when osmarenderer need a "name" tag, it will use the first available tag of
the following:

  name:en,name:de,name,name:he
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20090507/f04de22c/attachment.html>