Why are supported languages restricted?

[jonblatho]

https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/localization#list-of-supported-languages

Just curious, is there a technical reason why languages not listed here are supported by OSM and not by PMTiles? Our use case involves localized town names in the U.S. state of Oklahoma that included both English and Native American names (e.g. name:chr or a name including Cherokee characters). These names are displayed in a v3 tileset without issue.

While it's not the end of the world to lose this as we migrate to v4, some of our users appreciated seeing their town names localized, and I would like to know if there is a technical reason they were eliminated should we receive customer contacts, especially given the current political climate around the naming of features on maps.

Thanks!

[bdon]

(moved to basemaps repo as this concerns the contents of the basemap tilesets, not the pmtiles format)

Discussion here: #112

We don't want to bloat the low-zoom tiles with hundreds of languages, and the vast majority of users are going to use one of the few dozen ones, so we have this filter on the name:* tag inclusion in the default build.

The default build does include indigenous names in North America as long as they are part of the name tag in OSM and are in separate scripts, see Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics here.

But that mechanism may not work for Cherokee names if they are romanized, can you point to a specific OSM node?

The best solution may be to add a build flag passing all name:* tags through which would not pose any size problems for generating just the state of Oklahoma, etc, and then that .pmtiles can be hosted anywhere.

[jonblatho]

Thank you for the response; sorry that I put it in the wrong spot at first.

An example OSM node with name including the city name in both English and Cherokee (which, assuming my admittedly poor understanding of romanization/scripts/etc. is correct, I think is not romanized): https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/184332

I'd appreciate the build flag, or perhaps the ability to request that specific languages (in addition to or instead of the set of supported ones) are preserved might also work and be more flexible without compromising on tile size. Our tileset includes the entire continental U.S. (making way for potential future products), but most of our users are located/interested in Oklahoma or the surrounding states and are viewing maps at the state/regional level at "farthest."

Accordingly, our v3 tile sizes weren't problematic for our users to my knowledge, so either option here is fine by me personally. Thank you again!