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I'm having some difficulties with writing Welsh characters to a MapInfo Professional file and was wondering whether anybody could help?

I'm taking OS MasterMap Topographic data in gml format, in this case specifically looking at the Cartographic Text theme, this is then getting written out to a MapInfo Professional TAB file. The issue is that the Welsh characters are being shown as '?' when the file is then viewed in MapInfo Professional (or QGIS).

I've tried using both the MAPINFO and MITAB versions of the writer, the MITAB writer does offer a character encoding option but neither UTF 8 or 16 are in the list of available options. I also tried using an Attribute Encoder but this was pointless as the encoding within the FME process does appear to be UTF, it's the writer that is converting everything to, in this case, Windows Latin1 (the system default I believe).

Following a little more research it looks like later versions of MapInfo Professional do support UTF, possibly 15.x upwards? but the writers in FME 2018.0 only list version compatibility up to 11.50.

Has anybody got any ideas of how to get around this?

@darren - have you tried the MapInfo Extended writer format (short name MAPINFO_EXTENDED)? It was introduced in MapInfo 15.2 (according to the writer help) so that might support it.

Hi @darren,

Please try the new Mapinfo Extended Tab format that was added for FME 2017. It is faster than the original Mapinfo or Mitab writers, and allows you to choose utf-8 or utf-16 encoding.

@DaveAtSafe, @1spatialmary, many thanks for the suggestion of using the MapInfo Extended Tab format, unfortunately a majority of our installed MapInfo user base are still on v15.0 (32bit) which I don't believe supports the new format. The resulting TAB files are also used by our web mapping platform which again does not support the new file format.

As a workaround I've placed a small piece of Python script in the workspace that replaces the Welsh accented characters (that would other wise be converted to '?') and removes the accent, for example; '?' becomes 'w' etc. which whilst not correct is better than the alternative.

@DaveAtSafe, @1spatialmary, many thanks for the suggestion of using the MapInfo Extended Tab format, unfortunately a majority of our installed MapInfo user base are still on v15.0 (32bit) which I don't believe supports the new format. The resulting TAB files are also used by our web mapping platform which again does not support the new file format.

As a workaround I've placed a small piece of Python script in the workspace that replaces the Welsh accented characters (that would other wise be converted to '?') and removes the accent, for example; '?' becomes 'w' etc. which whilst not correct is better than the alternative.

Hi @darren,

 

For simplifying the accented character, you might want to try the StringDiacriticRemover transformer form the FME Hub. If you are connected to the internet, it should be available within Workbench directly.

 

@DaveAtSafe, @1spatialmary, many thanks for the suggestion of using the MapInfo Extended Tab format, unfortunately a majority of our installed MapInfo user base are still on v15.0 (32bit) which I don't believe supports the new format. The resulting TAB files are also used by our web mapping platform which again does not support the new file format.

As a workaround I've placed a small piece of Python script in the workspace that replaces the Welsh accented characters (that would other wise be converted to '?') and removes the accent, for example; '?' becomes 'w' etc. which whilst not correct is better than the alternative.

Hi Darren.

 

MapInfo Pro supports several 8 bit characters in the old TAB format, which works well for e.g. Danish in code page WindowsLatin1. I assume that the Welsh characters aren't part of WindowsLatin1?

 

 

I googled it, and found the correct code page to be ISO8859-14.

 

 

Unfortunately this code page isn't supported by the old TAB (CharSet clause), so your best option would be to use the "Neutral" code page, which should stop all formatting attempts by MapInfo Pro.

 

 

Here's the supported list from the 15.0 x32 reference:

 

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