Live data from Hacker News

Vector tiles in QGIS 3.14

maptiler.com

11–14 of 14 posts

Re: Vector tiles in QGIS 3.14

#11

Is the only vector tile format supported here Mapbox Vector Tiles? It's a great format, but I'm wondering if there's also support for simple tiled GeoJSON.

No, it already supports basically every other format, and has for a long time. The new bit is that it supports MVTs, not that it newly supports any sort of vector tiles.

Re: Vector tiles in QGIS 3.14

#12

Didn't it have shapefile support since forever? What's the difference?

Shapefiles are a large, monolithic thing. Vector tiles are like the png tiles that you see in mapping applications, only with vector rather than rendered data.

If I was Only interested the data for a small region, I only need to download the tiles that cover the region, rather than a potentially global dataset.

Alternately, the wider zooms tend to have aggregated information, so you can still get a sense of the data at global scale.

Re: Vector tiles in QGIS 3.14

#13

Didn't it have shapefile support since forever? What's the difference?

Shapefiles are a large, monolithic thing. Vector tiles are like the png tiles that you see in mapping applications, only with vector rather than rendered data. If I was Only interested the data for a small region, I only need to download the tiles that cover the region, rather than a potentially global dataset. Alternately, the wider zooms tend to have aggregated information, so you can still get a sense of the data…

yes + this plugin also loads styles, which means you get final map, not just data

Re: Vector tiles in QGIS 3.14

#14
post #5

In case anyone was wondering what the broader appeal here is—the plugin is not specific to MapTiler. It looks like any Mapbox GL JSON compatible-theme can be used ( https://github.com/maptiler/qgis-maptiler-plugin#load-a-map-... ), which includes most vector and raster styles from Mapbox, Stadia Maps, Jawg Maps, and many others. (Disclosure: I cofounded Stadia Maps.)

This seems cool. In the recent past, I have made custom styles in mapbox studio, then used that as a basemap (via WMTS) in qgis. The dealbreaking issue at the time was that when exporting my maps to PDF, the basemap elements would scale based on the export’s DPI. So, a high quality map would have teensy street labels, and was thus unreadable.

So, curious to see if this new method of loading tiles resolves this issue (or, if a more recent version of Q resolves it - as I was using the previous LTS last time I tried this).

Post reply on HN