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Comment by sorenjan

How come these map projects still use raster tiles? Are there no open source map projects that render the OSM data to vector data, and renders that vector data on the clients GPU? Maybe raster tiles are better at something I'm missing, but vector maps are easier to style[0], localize, they're sharper, easier to rotate and zoom smoothly. Maybe it's harder than I think to render it on all sorts of clients including mobile?

When writing this I found out that MapTiler[1] is maintaining MapLibre GL JS[2], a fork of a Mapbox project to do just that. It would be interesting to see the difference between self hosting raster and vector maps and compare pros and cons. You can even render raster tiles from vector tiles on the server if the client needs it[3].

[0] https://openmaptiles.org/docs/style/mapbox-gl-style-spec/

[1] https://www.maptiler.com/open-source/

[2] https://github.com/MapLibre/maplibre-gl-js

[3] https://openmaptiles.org/docs/host/tileserver-gl/

parent sorenjan 4 years ago

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