On 13-02-19 22:04:14 CET, Steve Ratcliffe wrote:
Hi
On 13/02/13 20:04, Robert Joop wrote:
There is support for a number of character sets in mkgmap, but do we have any collected wisdom about what character repertoires are supported on our devices? While at the hack weekend, I tried some latin2 on my new device and was pleasantly surprised that “šř” appeared in a street name – on my old GPSmap 60CSx with the very same gmapsupp.img, I see them as what looks like “.Ø” on the map and “◊Ø” in the tooltip when hovering over it.
I hoped someone would reply with a detailed answer! I'm not an expert on the different devices. I am sure that the 'old' devices such as the Legend Cx and ones of that era, only supported the one character set. There may have been different versions sold in
… with “the one” being CP1252 and not ASCII, fortunately. It actually is the CP1252 superset of ISO 8859-1, I see the printable characters in the range 128–159 (which ISO 8859 reserves for a second set of control characters). Funny difference: code pages 125x all have the double dagger U+2021 ‡ on position 87, and most maps with these code pages show the “‡”. Only the map with CP1252 differs, it shows “++” instead! Is it the Garmin’s fault, or can mkgmap be the reason? Same for the Euro sign U+20AC €: CP1252 shows “Eu” at its position 0x80, while the other maps having it at the same position show the “€”. The micro sign U+00B5 μ becomes a ? on most code page maps, except for the Greek one, even though it is at the same position in all code pages.
different regions with different character sets. But the standard European one was code-page 1252 of course.
Newer devices seem to support a number of character sets. I have verified that my Nuvi 1490 can do Arabic script (code page 1256) for example. I would guess that it includes many/all of the western European from Greek to Cyrillic.
While I wouldn’t consider Greek and Cyrillic to be western European ;-), the Montana supports them. Interestingly, I get to see Arabic characters (CP1256), but not any Hebrew characters (CP1255). And in the Arabic map’s upper half, the latin based characters show up as “?”. Another peculiar thing: while the Garmin does its usual wierd upper/lower casing, TWO LABELS ARE ALL CAPS, namely those containing the ª feminine and º masculine ordinal indicators.
I believe it is still true that only devices sold in Asia are capable of Chinese/Japanese etc. characters - although you can download replacement firmware that includes them from Garmin.
Asian: A map with CP1258 shows up with totally unlabeled streets, not even anything from the ASCII range. As for CP874, the U+0Exx characters in the code page’s upper half do not show up, but the ASCII half looks complete. I haven’t tried any of the larger Asian code pages. rj