<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">
<div>Hi all,</div><div><br></div><div>The mask is more flexible and
cartographically more pleasing if you don't have a white background on
your map. Also, if your background varies (multiple colors (e.g. lake,
forest, agriculture), the mask is the only way to get rid of darker
colors while keeping light background colors.</div><div><br></div><div>See f.e. this example here:</div><div><br></div><div><img src="cid:ii_ltgypmxo9" alt="grafik.png" width="578" height="132" class="gmail-CToWUd gmail-a6T" tabindex="0"></div><div><br></div><div>Have
a look at the large labels "Pfaffhausen" and "Fällanden". Darker colors
from roads (black) and rivers (blue) are masked, but lighter colors
from forests, lakes and hillshading are preserved. The mask is the only
way to achieve this "selective" effect of masking.</div><div><br></div><div>All
other options like background rectangles or buffers have a fixed color
and only work on a homogeneous background. They wouldn't be able to
achieve the effect of the example above.</div><div><br></div><div>I hope this clarifies the difference in the approaches?</div><div><br></div><div>The only major problems with the masks are the following limitations (hopefully they can be removed in the future):</div><div>-
they cannot be used within the same layer (you need to duplicate layers
if you want to mask features with labels from the same layer)</div><div>-
they don't yet work on vector tiles, because vector tiles aren't real
QGIS vector layers with all the symbology options. They only have a
limited set of symbology so far</div><div><br></div><div>Greetings,</div><div>Andreas<br></div></div><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>--<br>Andreas Neumann<br></div><a href="http://QGIS.ORG" target="_blank">QGIS.ORG</a> board member (treasurer)<br></div></div></div>