[Qgis-user] Offline background map for large regions

[Patrick Dunford]

What you are talking about is vector based data which can be put into a 
project as either raster tiles generated statically, or vector tiles 
generated on the fly, and what you can actually get in practice will 
depend on what you have the skill or ability to implement. Implementing 
a tileserver of any kind requires quite a skillset.

I would go back to the shapefiles and look at the amount of detail that 
is needed at each zoom level. You can implement style rules that work at 
different scale levels, meaning the level of detail that is displayed at 
a small scale can be simplified quite a lot. I use this for generating 
XYZ tiles for a web site I maintain, because zoomed right out at zoom 
level 1 (something like a scale of 1:500 000) it is much easier to find 
the general area of the map without a lot of unnecessary clutter and has 
the bonus of taking less time to render.

On 15/07/22 11:35, Andreas via Qgis-user wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> thank you for the links!
>
> Despite this is for Windows (I use Linux), it is for a XYZ tileserver
> but I need vector tiles. Raster tiles may be too many for whole Europe
> in plenty zoom levels. And I don't know where to get them, as everywhere
> I know you can only download small regions; the mentioned link in the
> video opentiles.com does not exist any more.
>
> Postgres may not work for me, as I read it needs at least as much RAM as
> the file size to import the map into the database. My vector tiles have
> 20 GB while my PC only 8 GB. It may run out of memory.
>
> But probably this points me to the right direction. I just discovered
> there is tileserver-GL https://tileserver.org/ and tileserver-PHP
> available and I gave them a try.
>
> Don't know why, but tileserver-gl can not be installed on Linux with nmp
> (compile error due to unexpected OS), and there are only the options npm
> or Docker. Docker is not in the standard repositories so foreign package
> sources shall be added, what I really want to avoid because of the high
> security risk. I tried also tileserver-PHP, but strangely as it is
> intended as a local installation, it shows not even a configuration
> interface without  internet access. It pulls its css and some javascript
> from an external server :-/  Also, I can not get it running with the
> maptiler .mbtiles because the WMTS capabilities (.mbtiles is read!)
> seems to be provided in a wrong syntax.
>
> So, still stuck...
>
> Regards,
>
> Andreas
>