[Qgis-user] International/Local Labeled World Basemap in QGIS. Protomaps?

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 10/24/23 13:40, Greg Troxel via QGIS-User wrote:
> I am not sure how I feel about "range requests are the right answer" vs
> tiles, as from a CS viewpoint it seems to be the same thing and it feels
> a little like "you have to do it our way now", and it's not clear to me
> that there is a layer that basically extracts tiles from the big file,
> separating the tiles/range issue from the rest.  I hope it is that way.
> I can see that currently people can host a big file with ranges more
> easily than a hierarchy of files.

I'm not a specialist in this, but my point in this, is that it is easy to fetch this big file from the build page (or use the tools to create it theirself).

And as it looks like all this is very good cache-able I think it is better then having a more heavy solution like mapservers or mapproxy servers?
  
I'm ok both with a Object storage solution (with range requests if I'm right) OR with some small proxy in front to handle xyz/pbf requests.

> My impression is that there is js for browsers to obtain the bits via
> range requests and then render.  Is there a plugin that will effectively
> fetch the tiles from this alternate (non-TMS, non-OGC) representation?
> And then render?  Or is your idea to obtain vector data, and have a
> separate qgis-specific rendering pipeline?

We could start (with the xyz version which is already available (after getting a key):
	https://api.protomaps.com/tiles/v2/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf?key=<your-key>
crux here is to get styles which work in QGIS.

I also do like the work of Jochen Topf (see an earlier mail of me):
https://dev.jochentopf.com/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf
with style
https://dev.jochentopf.com/projects/map/colorful.json

Crux there is to setup the infrastructure (including postgis/osm) and creation of tiles.

> Saying "host a 110 Gb" file leads to the obvious question of update
> rate, but monthly updates would be decent for many uses.

Not sure, but as a basemap lacks a lot of details, once per 1,2 or 3 months seems reasonable to me?

> But this is vector.  Are you suggesting that this be geodetic in
> ITF2014, instead of projected?

No, just that people maybe prefer (national) vector tile sets in their own local crs's.
Maybe I'm the only one looking for World-maps :-)

> I wonder how this compares to loading OSM in postgis and styling it.
> It would be nice to have consistent methods so that one can mix and
> match the various architectural (vs GIS) layers in the stack without
> them being siloed.

I've been trying that, but styling is too much work for me, the labeling alone (have all the proper fonts available) is already a lot of work.

Regards,

Richard