Vector tiles in QGIS 3.14

> It's worth noting postgis has exported to mapbox vector tiles for some time (ST_AsMVT).

It's pretty conceivable to use ST_AsMVT now in QGIS to power a layer or two. We use QGIS pretty extensively to work with PostGIS tables already, so the ability to see the data in prerender stage (raw geometries) and all the middle and end stages (processed geometries and MVTs) we want is super powerful for anyone wanting to work with vector tiles and PostGIS.

This seems cool. In the recent past, I have made custom styles in mapbox studio, then used that as a basemap (via WMTS) in qgis. The dealbreaking issue at the time was that when exporting my maps to PDF, the basemap elements would scale based on the export’s DPI. So, a high quality map would have teensy street labels, and was thus unreadable.

So, curious to see if this new method of loading tiles resolves this issue (or, if a more recent version of Q resolves it - as I was using the previous LTS last time I tried this).

No, it already supports basically every other format, and has for a long time. The new bit is that it supports MVTs, not that it newly supports any sort of vector tiles.

Shapefiles are a large, monolithic thing. Vector tiles are like the png tiles that you see in mapping applications, only with vector rather than rendered data.

If I was Only interested the data for a small region, I only need to download the tiles that cover the region, rather than a potentially global dataset.

Alternately, the wider zooms tend to have aggregated information, so you can still get a sense of the data at global scale.