How to display place names in one language only in the plugin

[mikemcc]

Can anyone please tell me how to display place names in one language
only (normally English) in the GE plugin ? I find that the display
gets very cluttered in (say) Europe when one zooms in and place names
are displayed in English, German and French.

I have searched around but the nearest I found was:
http://code.google.com/apis/earth/documentation/options.html#setting_the_language
which says that the language code sets the language of roads and
borders.

Thanks. Mike

[mikemcc]

Does any kind person have any thoughts on this ? Perhaps Josh L ?

I tried setting the language code which sets the language of roads and
borders - with partial success. You can download 2 examples ...

When I coded:
google.load('earth', '1');
I got:
www.around-the-world.co.uk/downloads/DuplicateLabels_LanguageNotSpecified.jpg

When I coded
google.load('earth', '1', { 'language': 'en' });
I got:
www.around-the-world.co.uk/downloads/DuplicateLabels_LanguageEn.jpg

When no language is specified, you can see that Porto and Lisbon, for
example, are labelled in 3 ways. When the English language is
specified, you can see that Porto and Lisbon are labelled in 2 ways.

I think it's important to be able to display only one label per place
- to avoid clutter.

Maybe it's not possible, in which case I'll raise a request so we can
control the labels in the GE API.

Thanks. Mike

[mikemcc]

For some reason the above links to screenshots don't work for me "as
is", although if you right click on the links, copy the link address
and edit out the Google stuff before www and after jpg, they are fine.
Basically their address is:
www.around-the-world.co.uk/downloads/
plus one of these file names:
DuplicateLabels_LanguageEn.jpg
DuplicateLabels_LanguageNotSpecified.jpg

[Rossko]

> For some reason the above links to screenshots don't work for me "as
> is", although if you right click on the links, copy the link address
> and edit out the Google stuff before www and after jpg, they are fine.

Its the forum formatting. Were you to supply the links with a leading
http:// they would work fine.

What is your browser language in your tests? Google usually try to
honour the browser language, assuming that is what the end user would
want.

[mikemcc]

Thanks Rossko about the http:// prefix. Browser language was also a
good line of investigation, thanks, but sadly I have now checked IE,
Firefox, Opera and Chrome with UK / British English and US English to
see what they display when the user gradually zooms into Vienna and
all scenarios show:
- Wien and (Vienna) in a white font
- Wien and (Vienna) in a cream font
The same happens when specifying French or Austrian German in IE (and
I assume the other browsers).

An example is at:
http://www.around-the-world.co.uk/downloads/DuplicateLabels_IE_EnUk.jpg

Any other thoughts from anyone please ? It seems such a basic
localisation issue that I imagine / hope that GE has this one covered
somehow.

Mike

[Josh L]

Hi Mike,

There should be two labels: the user language (what the browser
believes is your local language) and the local language of the actual
location.

In the Google Earth client you can disable the "Alternative Place
Names" layer under Borders and Labels -> Labels -> Alternative Place
Names, however there is no option to do this in the plugin. You may
wish to create a feature request in the issue tracker to add the
ability to disable the "Alternative Place Names" Layer
programmatically via the API.

Cheers,

-Josh

[mikemcc]

Thanks Josh. I'll do that when I have a moment. Mike.