felt / tippecanoe

Build vector tilesets from large collections of GeoJSON features.
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Support for arbitrary projections #80

Open gberaudo opened 1 year ago

gberaudo commented 1 year ago

Now that Mapbox suppors many projections . Do you plan to add support for generating MVTs in arbitrary EPSG projections?

stonetip commented 1 year ago

This shouldn’t be necessary since Mapbox is reprojecting on the fly. Also, when zoomed in the map essentially transforms to web Mercator. See https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections for more info. It’s an interesting read.

gberaudo commented 1 year ago

Hi @stonetip, thanks for the link.

Adaptative projections support is the exception. Except Mapbox, I am not aware of another MVT rendering library that supports it. For example, MapLibre or OpenLayers don't support it and I don't see such support added in the near future. MapBox uses a non-free license nowadays; they are not willing to share their innovation with the geospatial community.

On the contrary, OpenLayers have supported MVT layers in arbitrary projection since the start. Today one can use postgres ST_AsMVT function to dynamically create MVT tiles of arbitrary projection. It would be great to have such support in tippecanoe, which is a great tool for generating static tiles.