option to choose character set

Question

HI.

GF is planning a trip to Egypt and we had a look at possible cashes at her destination when I realized a small issue.

All region names are in arabic characters and we still have some difficulties to properly understand them. Could it be an option to choose to display them using english names or at least with a character set I understand?

(tools / maps region as an example)

regards

/1d

Answer 1

The character set is charset=utf-8 so both Arabic and Latin characters works fine but that is not what you are asking for

I suspect to change the code to make i possible to change the language of name on  region etc require a lot of work. Especially when there exist an easy solution on the fly translation in the web browser. It is built in in chrome just right click on the page and chose "Translate to English" or what your local language is. The regions are then in english and work correctly when you select one

 

I suspect it might be possible on other browsers with or without plugins/addons

Answer 2

I assume that this is not about the character set / encoding, but about the place names on the map.

I agree that reading 「0 finds in أسيوط」 in the pop-up is a bit irritating, and OSM only has the Arabic variant of the place names, but Google Maps has both, at least for me. (I know you can toggle English names on/off in the “stand-alone” Google map, but the one integrated here seems to always show both.)

Might be worth a feature request at openstreetmap.org to add English place names to the map? (This is not a PGC issue).

As for the pop-ups… this *is* a PGC issue, but it depends on the data source used (an Admin could probably look for where the region names come from – if they come from OSM, someone has to add the English names there (if not already), expose them to PGC, and then PGC must add them). But I agree this would be a nice feature for holiday planning. (I personally use the local names over the English names whenever possible, but even if this worked for me in Bosnia which has both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, the latter I can only read a little bit, I do not read Arabic at all, so, yes, this would help.)