GNOME Maps and the tile problem

Posted Jul 30, 2016 20:55 UTC (Sat) by gioele (subscriber, #61675)
In reply to: GNOME Maps and the tile problem by patrakov
Parent article: GNOME Maps and the tile problem

> I think that local rendering is the way to go. Use case: laptop with an LTE modem, I am in a foreign country, so traffic is very expensive.

Beware: in many heavily edited urban parts of the OSM map the raw data is bigger than the rendered PNG tile.

(One could say that in those cases a picture is worth a thousand nodes.)

GNOME Maps and the tile problem

Posted Jul 31, 2016 15:06 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Would there be no way to benefit from or work with the Marble team on this?

See http://nienhueser.de/blog/?p=688 for some info about their approach.

GNOME Maps and the tile problem

Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:30 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link]

Pretty much nobody (appart from OSM editors) use the raw OSM data to render. They all do some initial filtering, keeping only the data they know to interpret, and sometimes simplifying the geometry. Some extract a region and convert it to a binary format more suited to rendering/routing. Some put the extracted data in PostGIS and render pngs tiles from there. Some do the same step but render vector tiles instead.

Vector tiles has been the focus of a lot of OSM development in recent years, because they are much more flexible (think changing the display language, optionaly show buildings, etc) while puting a lower load on the server. But it's difficult, and hasn't overtaken png tiles in popularity yet.