Usage of special character (Arabic) not readable with Garmin GPS

General talk
1

In openstreetmaps of North Africa there is cities and street names in Arabic characters that are not readable with the Garmin GPS. How can we use the Latin names only?

2

Use e.g. the Mkgmap option:

--name-tag-list=name:en,int_name,name

This prefers English or International name tags first before falling back to the normal name tag.

Alternatively, you can also download maps from http://garmin.na1400.info/routable.php which are transliterated in addtion to the option above (transliteration is the translation of foreign languages to latin characters while adhering to official conversions).

3

Thanks for the very quick answer, but I have difficulties to understand/ implement your method:
I have loaded mkgmap on windows, and tried to run it with mkgmapGUI, but in the downloaded files from the OSM server I have no file with .osm extension.
Please direct me to a web site orconsider non specialist user explanation:

  • how can I run mkgmap on windows?
  • where can I found the .osm files (only .img files were downloaded in osm_routable_mapsource.exe or oms_routable_gmapsupp.zip or osm_routable_tiles.zip or gmapsupp;img)
    sorry
4

It looks like mkgmapGui doesn’t have way to enter command line options and creates the IMG files you found. To do what you need to do you’ll probably need to download OSM data directly from OSM and then run mkgmap on your data from the command line.

It takes a while to figure it out, but here’s the place to start:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap

5

Additionally to what Seldom says:

Mkgmap needs Java 1.6 so you will have to install that first (if you don’t have it already)

OSM files can be downloaded as e.g. country extracts here but you will probably need to split those country extracts into smaller sections (I call those sections ‘tiles’ or ‘maptiles’) using the Splitter tool (you can download it from the same Mkgmap site). I don’t provide the source OSM files as the Garmin map service is already using an awful lot of bandwidth and I don’t want to add to that by having the osm sourcetiles downloadable.