Message Text rendering is the worst thing about raster tiles. It’s actually pretty great for things like landcover. Even buildin…

17 September 2026

Text rendering is the worst thing about raster tiles. It’s actually pretty great for things like landcover. Even buildings and some linear features can be OK. But text…. I get a headache when I open OSM in any East Asian country LOL.

14:51

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Ian Wagner14:48But middle ground approaches generally are possible. For example in OpenLayers you can mix raster and vector layers (of multiple types; even GeoJSON and I think I

Ian Wagner14:50But yeah, you colud have certain base layers as a PNG “background” and only send over vector layers for things like linear features and text.

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mnalis15:39What do you mean, there are at least two vector tiles on openstreetmap.org website? Click on the layers icon and choose Shortbread or MapTiler OMT. Or did you m I

Ian Wagner15:40Cut labels are a perennial problem, but yeah it does manage to pack a lot more detail if that’s what you want. The Shortbread and OMT schemas are not really des