Leaflet Map with Cities in English in R

Question

I am working on a Shiny application where I am required to plot positions of ships on a map. Currently I am using leaflet and the OpenSeaMap as the base layer on which I am plotting the positions (addProviderTiles(providers$OpenSeaMap)). However, when the map is rendered the various cities and ports appear in the local language as shown below: That's not very useful as the users are mostly English speaking. Is there any way in changing the tiles to display only English names? I have already had a look at this. I am restricted to using the OpenSeaMap tiles only because of the traffic separation schemes displayed in those tiles.

Answer 1

If you have to stick to OpenSeaMap tiles then no, you can't change the language of the labels. Unfortunately these Labels are part of the raster images, they are not a separate layer.

However OpenSeaMap is composed of a base layer and a seamark layer (https://tiles.openseamap.org/seamark/). The base layer containing the map, city labels and so on is the OSM standard style and can be replaced by any other layer. So you can use a tile server with English labels plus the seamark layer on top of it.

If this is not a solution for you then how about adding an additional layer with English labels? So your users can at least switch to a layer with labels they can read, browse to the area they want to view, then switch back to OpenSeaMap tiles to see sea marks. Not a nice solution but it works.