But now, as vector tiles, this data allows you to control colours, line weight, font, and, of course the visibility of elements. As raster tiles, OpenStreetMap data was ideal for areas where you just could not get decent data-if, say, you were mapping the streets of a city in Turkmenistan. You commonly have a map that’s been embedded in a web page that includes the javascript libraries for mapbox rendering, such as here.īut vector tiles offer the cartographer a lot. Their main use is for people viewing maps through browsers. Vector map tiles (VMTs) were not developed for GIS use.

This means the server sends tiles of vector data, which are then styled at the user’s end by QGIS. QGIS 3.14 and above can handle vector tile servers as data sources.

This means that if the label is supposed to be 2.5 mm high, it’ll be 2.5 mm high no matter what dpi you export at out of the print layout. If you work instead with vector tiles, the text labels are not baked into the tile: they are rendered by QGIS. 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. 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.

Maptiler vector