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I'm building a mobile app in which I'd like to show maps relative to a user's direction of motion, so that up is always forward for the user. (Sort of like what navigation apps do.) When I try this with normal tiles, the text is awkward to read. What's my best approach to fixing the text orientation?

The two obvious approaches I can find are rendering my own bitmap tiles and dynamically rendering from vector tiles. Are there other approaches I should be looking at? And what are the tradeoffs?

If it's helpful in answering the question, I'm a developer comfortable running my own servers, but the tile-server stuff looks complicated enough I'm happy to avoid that. Thanks!

asked 13 Sep '19, 17:42

WilliamPietri's gravatar image

WilliamPietri
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accept rate: 0%

Non-answer: In case you haven't seen it, there is a rather long list of frameworks on the wiki.

(13 Sep '19, 18:53) InsertUser

Thanks! In this case I'm writing in Dart and Flutter, so none of the existing tools will do. I could build something based on MapBox's vector tiles, but I thought I'd first look at what I could do with OSM, as I'd rather go an open-source route if it's not too much extra work.

(13 Sep '19, 22:18) WilliamPietri

Mapbox vector tiles are almost certainly the way to go, but there are lots of open-source options for generating them from OSM data.

(15 Sep '19, 23:31) Richard ♦

There's likely no such thing as the "best approach" InsertUser has already pointed to the wiki list of frameworks, so I'll leave that out.

Essentially it really depends on if you believe that asking your users to download an area in advance is a good idea or not. If the answer is yes you could use mapsforge, OsmAnd or mapsme format (you would likely need to produce the necessary glue/bindings for Dart). If no then you are stuck with vector tiles either with mapbox gl, or if you are in to zombies, mapzens tangram. You don't necessarily need to have a lot of infrastructure to do that, you just need something serving pre-generated tiles if you don't mind having stale data (see for example https://openmaptiles.org/ ).

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answered 14 Sep '19, 12:54

SimonPoole's gravatar image

SimonPoole ♦
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accept rate: 18%

edited 16 Sep '19, 11:24

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question asked: 13 Sep '19, 17:42

question was seen: 3,093 times

last updated: 16 Sep '19, 11:24

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum