Hello. There are many applications that use the name=* tag in OSM. You will usually use the name=* tag when you intentionally want to use the name in the default language. (Example: OSMand lets you optionally choose between “local names” or a specific language. And the default style at openstreetmap.org uses exclusivly name=* because it wants to use always the local names. They do intentionally not use localized tags like name:en, name:jp, name:de…)
The content of name=* is plain Unicode. Problem: This is not enough to render the text correctly. There are glyphs (character shapes) that are different in the four variants (japanese, traditional chinese, simplified chinese, korean) of the CJK script, but Unicode encodes them at the same codepoint. Also there are four variants of some cyrillic glyphs (russian, bulgarian, serbian, mazedonian) that are encoded at the same Unicode codepoint. In the web, this problem is easily solved: The HTML code contains a language tag that gives the necessary information about the language. So the Internet browser can display everything correctly. In OSM this information is missing. Deduce this information by the country in which our OSM element is located is not very reliably. Also within the same country may exist (much) more than only one language. It’s also error-prone. That’s not an option. Deduce this information by comparing with the other name:en, name:jp, name:de … tags does also not help. Example: The node http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/25248662 (english: Beijing) has name=北京市 and name:ja=北京市 and name:zh=北京市. They are identical. We cannot reliably determine the language of the name value. It would also not work for double-language names like “Bruxelles - Brussel” where none of the name:??=* tags has an identical value. I was thinking about a new tag that could give us the necessary language information for the “name” tag. Something like TAGNAME=es to express that the “name ” tag is in spanish… -- Lukas Sommer _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
