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Our map data comes from the amazing openstreetmap.org community mapping project. It is their style and convention to show map text in the native language and script of the country that the text is. Every other offline iOS map app we have seen displays text in this way and so far, we have too.
However, localized text does exist for many places in the world, and we have just added support for it via a language setting (Settings > Data Cache > Map Labels). PocketEarth v1.2.2 is now available.I just purchased the app today, and setting map labels to OSM, international, or local still doesn’t display the proper text for Japanese maps. 🙁
Please help your users in Japan, thanks.Thank you for pointing out the lack of proper Japanese transliteration. The situation is a bit complicated because Japanese makes use of Chinese characters and the transliteration function treats them using Chinese phonetic rules. Additionally, PocketEarth currently lacks support for Chinese and some other asian fonts so displaying a transliterated form is the only option in some cases.We are working on an improvement of the transliteration function as well as adding support for the missing asian fonts. We hope to have it fixed in one of the coming versions of PocketEarth. Unfortunately this will not be ready for our next update (v1.3, to be released in October).Please note that our map data comes from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community mapping project which has excellent coverage in many places, but less detail in some other places. You can view the OSM map detail on their website (http://www.openstreetmap.org), and even contribute to it by adding missing content and translations.
PocketEarth attempts to use the labels specified by Settings > Data Cache > Map Labels first if available. If it is not available, it then tries to use the one specified by Settings > Data Cache > Map Labels II. If it is also not available, PocketEarth will try to pick the best choice automatically based on the selection of available data. Finally, if the label is in a non-Latin character set and either the Transliteration option is enabled (Settings > Advanced > Transliterate Text) or the font for the language is not available, PocketEarth will phonetically transliterate the text into a Latin approximation.It has been a while since this post was updated. Is there any progress on Asian font issue? Do you have any time frame when this will be fixed?
PocketEarth achieves its great rendering performance, in part, by using OpenGL, the same graphics technology that enables most video games. Unfortunately for us, this means that we must handle all font/text rendering aspects ourselves as Apple does not provide efficient means for us to draw text in OpenGL. This is a huge amount of work, and developing it has been perhaps the single most time consuming aspect of making our app!
We had hoped to deliver Asian font support in our next update, v1.5 to be released in the next few weeks, however, its looking like it won’t make it in until v1.6. But Asian text support is now our most requested enhancement, and it is our highest priority. If it doesn’t make it into v1.5, you can be sure it will be in v1.6. We don’t have a specific timeline for v1.6, but I can tell you it will be released as soon as the Asian text issue is resolved.Just a quick update: While we have released v1.6 update, it was a very small update meant mainly to correct a number of important bugs and other issues in the app. We are still working on asian font support and plan to have it available in our next update. Please know that this is our TOP priority! Hopefully this will be at most one month away, but we can’t guarantee it at this point. Thank you for your patience!
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