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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

funny they gave cyrilic as an example. I've recently been on Ukraine and wanted to test it out for fun. scanned part of a menu (capital letters) while in a restaurant with wifi and the result was something like "3KOUIJL3KLJLKOOOASA3IIU". even though Ukrainian!=Russian, with such scan results you can't even attempt to translate it.

btw out of curiosity I've tested a few google mobile apps while traveling. my experience:

translate - needs internet and failed reading cyrilic.

google maps - offline caching didn't work at all, I didn't know how to get to my cached maps as when I start maps it raises a message that I need internet connection and didn't let me go further.

google drive - I pressed 'offline' and wanted to create a document and it says I need internet connection. lol.

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You need to tell it that the source language is Russian; if you tell it the source language is English, it will try to recognize Cyrillic characters as Roman, which doesn't work. Also, it looks like the scan option is not available for Ukrainian at all. But for something like a restaurant menu, you're probably fine telling it the language is Russian--there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.

> there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.

I know, and I can read cyrilic.

> You need to tell it that the source language

well, if it wasn't a bug, now I guess I faced a usability issue (using translate online it usually auto-detects the lang so I'm not used to choosing it), that's probable, and one friend of mine also told me he got gibberish from scanning cyrilic.

still one case stands: the need of a working data connection when you are travelling abroad is an obstacle.

The difference between auto guessing it online and during scanning is that it has to do one more round of guessing during OCR which is why it is more error prone.

google maps with offline cached maps works fine for me. are you on a recent version?

how do you access them? turn your phone into airplane mode and open google maps fresh. I get the loading spinner followed by a 'network failure. this aplication requires a working data connection' message .

You didn't answer my question: are you using an up-to-date version of Maps?

If you are, go the My Places> Offline to see your maps.

WFM in airplane mode.

yes, up to date.

Okay... version?

I need you to respond to the other part of my question:

> If you are, go the My Places> Offline to see your maps.

You need to describe what you see, what you are doing, and what happens.

if I'm online - yes, it works perfectly. but I don't need them offline when I'm online.

I described what happens when I'm offline - error, you need data connection. that's it. v6.12.0, play says it's up to date.

and did you cache maps before going offline?

You have to specifically save maps in advance. I think it used to be an optional labs feature but is now baked in. I believe it's activated by a long tap in the middle of the area you want to save.

You also might consider one of the apps that's uses OpenMap data to have a whole country offline.

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