Use user-preferred language in labels

[1ec5]

All map labels now use the name:* field corresponding to the user’s preferred language if available, falling back to the user’s second preferred language and so on. If none of the preferred languages is available, labels fall back to the local language. English is no longer hard-coded.

Spanish and Traditional Chinese, falling back to the local language:

Working towards #20.

[1ec5]

The text-field expressions continue to be evaluated statically as the page loads. To dynamically switch languages after the page loads, we could listen for the languagechange and tear down and rebuild all the layers. This would require refactoring americana.js.

[1ec5]

#579

[1ec5]

The user-preferred language could be Arabic or Hebrew, which are both written right to left. As tail work, we should install the mapbox-gl-rtl-text plugin to keep the map readable for users of these languages.

[1ec5]

#580

[ZeLonewolf]

How does this work? Is it based on a user's web browser settings?

[ZeLonewolf]

Awesome...

[ZeLonewolf]

I'm not going to pretend that I fully understand how this works, but the result is awesome!

[jleedev]

I seem to recall that it was once possible for navigator.languages to be empty, but both chrome and firefox appear to default to en-us when I set their respective preference to empty string, so defensive coding there isn't needed.

[1ec5]

I seem to recall that it was once possible for navigator.languages to be empty, but both chrome and firefox appear to default to en-us when I set their respective preference to empty string, so defensive coding there isn't needed.

This is actually for Node, which doesn’t support navigator.languages yet.

[jleedev]

I seem to recall that it was once possible for navigator.languages to be empty, but both chrome and firefox appear to default to en-us when I set their respective preference to empty string, so defensive coding there isn't needed.

This is actually for Node, which doesn’t support navigator.languages yet.

Node.js doesn't have navigator at all, not sure what you mean here.

[1ec5]

Oh, right…

[1ec5]

I brought the transportation_label layers under the new localized label system as well. However, due to openmaptiles/openmaptiles#769, roads can only be in English, German, or the local language.

[answerquest]

How do we make this change happen? I'm not seeing any place in the main map https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana to change language

[1ec5]

See the instructions in the readme.

[1ec5]

#622 implemented a control in the lower-right corner to set the map’s language independently of your browser settings, so you no longer need to know the ISO 639 code of the language you want to see.

Find out more about Americana’s label localization and its use cases in this OSMUS blog post.