In 2018 I described, at the end of a post, a way to work around this, but now there’s a better option. Text labels and icons, like everything else, are “baked” into the raster tiles at a reasonable size for display at 96 dpi. The print layout also winds up asking for tiles at a higher zoom level. What is the technology behind and how can you adapt it already today? Raster tiles, vector tiles, and what is the difference Raster tiles description Vector tiles are becoming a new trend and are most likely the future of map publishing.The reason those labels and icons come out so small with raster tiles is that your screen display is something like 96 pixels/inch, but the print layout has to pack them down to 300 pixels/inch. Traditionally, web maps were based on raster tiles technology. It was a set of squared images placed next to each other, each with a fixed geographical area and scale. The rest was delivered to your browser when you changed the position or zoom.Ī more detailed guide about raster tiles can be found in this document.Ī map divided into raster tiles Vector tiles description Together they were creating the whole world, but only tiles you were actually browsing were shown. Vector tiles, which were introduced later, also deliver data that are divided into roughly squared tiles. But instead of raster images, there are pre-generated vector data that are present on the requested area. Map elements that overflow current tile are cut with a specific offset, which is essential when connecting tiles together. Vector tiles are rendered on the client side. A map style defines the look of all elements in tiles. The style says what map element should be rendered, which color, which font should be used for a label, and which language this label should be rendered. It gives more opportunities to change the map on the fly with minimum effort. Vector tiles are transferred over the web in the form of packed geographic data in vector format split into squared tiles.īecause of this flexibility and the possibility to render raster tiles from pre-generated vector tiles on request if needed, most of the big players in the mapping industry have already switched. Suitable for raster data like satellite/aerial imagery.Lower requirements for end-users hardware.Still a bit better support in web JavaScript libraries and desktop GIS software.A bigger size of each tile and data on servers.Slower loading disrupts the user experience when moving around the map.It is possible to mix raster tiles with vector tiles and make the best usage of both, e.g., satellite map (raster tiles) with an overlay of streets with labels available in many languages (vector tiles) Satellite map of Europe with Korean labels - the same tiles can be used with any other language - without a need to render tiles again. There is only a need to make a small change in the style, a one-line change in the text file. This change can also be done on the fly from a drop-down menu. If you have any data in vector formats, you can quickly generate vector tiles out of them using MapTiler Desktop. This functionality has been available since version 10. You drag and drop your data in Shapefile, GeoJSON, or another vector format into MapTiler Desktop, adjust final map properties if you like to, and select output format. You can create the map in MBTiles, GeoPackage, or Folder structure. The entire process is described in this how-to. Supported web frontend libraries and mobile SDKsĭespite the relative novelty of vector tiles, they are already supported by many JavaScript libraries: You can try it with sample data of New York City subway stations and subway lines. Mobile SDKs support loading vector tiles on both iOS and Android. Vector tiles can be loaded in desktop GIS software like QGIS, ArcGIS, and others.
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