Great stuff!
So first thing to note is that placenames for the main mapnik rendering on
www.openstreetmap.org are off the "name" key. "name" can be English, Hindi, or
the local state name. It's up for you all to decide. The [EMAIL PROTECTED]
rendering works in the same fashion; it's distributed to clients that
participate, and so results in a quicker rendering in days rather than a week.
But essentially it also works off of name.
If in either mapnik or [EMAIL PROTECTED], Indic character rendering has any
issue, we should work on that specifically. Are there issues? Definitely
possible to get support from the main developers of these tools on this.
Longer term, we want to see tiles localized on the main site. Arindam has
localised the rails framework, which means the application itself can be
translated, and displayed in a users local language. There are open questions
on tile localisation .. is it a completely different set of tiles? or are
labels rasterized seperately from geometries? and combined by the tile server
or by OpenLayers on the client side? This will take time to sort out and
something we should look into too.
In any case, I definitely encourage the set up of a local tile server for
India. Generally, OSM wants to see more mapnik instances out there, to take
burden off the main tile server. It's also crucial to address bandwidth issues
with India .. a local server will simply load faster. And importantly, to
increase the number of people knowledgable about these tools.
tiles.openstreetmap.org is just one machine. Inquire on the dev list for specs,
but it's nothing outrageous. Setting up mapnik, and import and synchronization
is becoming a more well worn path. I've set this up a couple times already, and
am happy to support any effort to do so.
For an example of this, check out Freemap Slovakia, which is based entirely on
OSM, but with local rendering.
http://www.freemap.sk/
Best
Mikel
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