Right after I got to be the maintainer of the German Mapnik style in 2012 I immediately thought that it would be nice to have Latin labels on my map rather than the respective local script.

This is when the first versions of the OSMl10n functions were born.

At this time implementing them in PL/pgSQL as PostgreSQL stored procedures seemed to be a reasonable choice.

Actually this is what the (now deprecated) legacy implementation does.

However already back in 2019 this approach started to show a couple of limitations which led to the decision to relocate the transcription stuff into data procession stage (database import or Openstreetmap file processing), which is what this code does.

Localization functions are written in Lua, which has hase been chosen because this way the code can be easilly plugged into an osm2pgsql tag transformation script when importing Openstreetmap data into PostgreSQL which is certainly the most common thing to do for rendering maps.

Unfortunately however the most FOSS transcription libraries are written in Python not Lua and we want to use them. Thus we decided to make a daemon doing latin transcription written in this programming language.

If you intend to use this code in other processing pipelines than osm2pgsql the standalone software osm-tags-transform can also be used to add localized names to an Openstreetmap file before doing further processing.

Development is currently done on Debian GNU/Linux thus it is strongly recommended to also use a Debian or Ubuntu based system for deployment.

If you are working on a Windows based system using the Windows-Subsystem for Linux is a viable option.

See INSTALL.md for installation instructions.