But recently, Maik Gottschalk, a Guide user in Germany, sent me a dataset of about two million cities. This data currently is consuming about 50 MBytes on my hard drive, split up by country. I wrote a little piece of code to convert it into the format used by Guide. One problem is immediately apparent. This dataset increases the number of cities in Australia from a mere 22 to about 10,000.
Small towns are as apt to be shown as big cities.
In practice, I've also used it for things such as the Australian city name extension provided above. Both files have identical formats. The 'level of importance' codes are relative values. In the above text, Portland and Fort Nelson are given LOI codes of 2, indicating they are 'more important' than Prince George and Medford, which in turn are more important than Olympia. If text gets crowded, therefore, Guide will show the 'more important' places and omit the 'less important' places.