Rendering tiles with English labels when they are available

EricG97477 · 2019-08-31T14:39:12.000Z

I setup my own mapping tile server according to the instructions found at https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-18-04-lts/ (amazing job for whoever wrote them) and am using the planet data (https://planet.openstreetmap.org). However, when I render a tile in, for example, China (http://localhost/hot/7/106/53.png / https://a.tile.openstreetmap.org/7/106/53.png)), the labels are in Chinese characters.

I believe the English labels are available in the raw data…? Assuming this is correct, how can I get the renderer to use them when rendering the tiles?

Thank you.

stephan75 · 2019-09-02T20:18:24.000Z

Maybe you can find some hints at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_internationalization ?

SomeoneElse · 2019-09-03T10:27:01.000Z

If you “just want to display English everywhere” then the easiest option that I’ve tested is to just add a few lines to the lua file that it uses to do something like:

if ( keyvalues["name:en"] ~= nil ) then
   keyvalues["name"] = keyvalues["name:en"]
end

If you want something a bit more complicated, like display one language in one area and another in another, then you do that by following the procedure at https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/42069 .

With either method, you’ll get English names if the exist and whatever’s in the “name” tag if they don’t.