For Fridger (t00fri) about his Gazette

[Starman]

Greetings Doctor,
I have a feature request for you concerning the city gazette.

1. Many city names are used more then once throughout the world; in California for instance, you have Sacramento and San Francisco, but of course there's another two San Franciscos in South America, and one Sacramento. The problem as I'm sure you already know, is that Celestia only travels to one of them, and it's never the one I'd like. Fairfield, CA is another notable example as there are five different Fairfields in the world.

Here's the system I propose to fix the problem. Put parenthesis by the cities names and include a province/state/(or even) county initial.

Like Fairfield, California. Its obviously in the United States, but so are at least two others. You have to use the state initial or CA, like this;

Fairfield (CA)

in the name. Same with Fairfield, Mississippi, it'd be

Fairfield (MS).

In states/provinces where there are two or more cities with the same name, go even deeper and use the county in parenthesis like so:

Williams (CA; Colusa)
and
Williams (CA; Humboldt)

That's it. I apreciate your great contribution to Celestia, thanks for reading.

Celestia's Truly, --Starman

[selden]

Starman,

Unfortunately, I think you need both state/province and country code in order to avoid confusing the viewer. For example, CA is the code both for California and for Canada.

[t00fri]

Starman,

of course I am aware of this problem. In a few cases I have already applied more or less what you propose quite a while ago. But with 50000 entries (and the little time available to me), extensive hand editing is out of the question.

So I might consider hacking quickly another Perl script that looks for multiple name occurrences and then adds a further distinguishing label from what is available in the original data file.

One consideration is to keep things SHORT, since otherwise, in view of the label crowdedness, we will be back at overlapping labels...

Bye Fridger