I am glad the mapping has moved from Bing in RM7 to Open Street Map in RM8. But I am struggling with each country showing its place names in their local language. Following my Jewish ancestry around countries from the former Russian Empire is now proving even more challenging.
Is there anyway of getting the place names shown in English?
The only way I know is to go to the www.openstreetmap.org website - go to Russia (not literally) select Layers (sandwich icon) and pick a dual language layer (Cycle Map for Russia). You can then type in the non-Cyrillic place name in the Search box and get taken to it on the map. Then Right click, select Show address and the co-ordinates will appear in the Search Results for copy/paste into RM8. This method works when somebody has created a layer in dual language - by default OpenStreetMap shows the native language. I think there is also a layer for Israel where both Hebrew and Arabic are used.
Aha. So their “cycle” version with dual language labels is indeed the ideal version to get place names in English.
To access that version from within RM I assume I will have to appeal to RM to choose to change to that as default instead.
Would anyone object?
The local records would be using the local language place names so it might be difficult to match things up if your place names are the English equivalents. I think the default should be place names in the local language, but I would be happy to have the option to see them in English language equivalents too.