Compatibility with new Garmin devices and Unicode Maps

[Phillip Coetser]

Hi all, has anyone else ever thought what the difference is between, CNSA NT - (City Navigator South Africa NT New Technology and CNSA NT U - City Navigator South Africa NT Unicode?)....Not all devices support Unicode. Unicode version is for nuvi 37xx and probably 2xxx too. Usually older devices display map correctly but there can be problems with address search.
So what is “NTU” anyway? The “U” stands for Unicode, and the NTU maps include Unicode text encoding for enhanced language support. However only newer Garmin devices have support for Unicode, so Garmin continues to provide NT maps with standard text encoding for the "older" devices
Why then has Garmin introduced this?.... by adding a firmware bug, Garmin introduced, as part of their efforts to cut down on people "pirating" their maps. However by doing that they also cut down on Unicode maps produced by mkgmap or even some of their old (legitimate) maps which are not running anymore on these older devices. You will know that you need to use the Non Unicode map if on boot your GPS device tells you to "unlock maps". So then, why is the Europe Map in Unicode? Well for example in Greece and some Eastern Europe countries the script is Cyrillic not latin - and only Unicode maps can contain both scripts in one map. So the non unicode map will not correctly show labels in such countries. Use the country non unicode map instead. They are always in the predominant script of the country.

Regards