How can I generate raster tiles myself for a specific region, so I don't have to use planet.osm?
I can find regions on geofabrik.
I can find regions on geofabrik.
The newer way to do raster tiles is to actually generate vector tiles first, and then do the rasterization dynamically. Mapnik can do this, renderers like MapboxGL can be run in headless mode to do this as well.
Yes, I wish this was easier too.
Of course I can guess a lot of data can be removed and simplified, but still, PNG seem lighter...
The primary standard for vector tiles is Mapbox Vector Tiles (it's an open standard), which is really just a sqlite database following a particular schema.
My own personal experience developing against both png and vector tiles over the past few months is that vector tiles are better in just about every way for the kinds of things you use maps for in apps. I expect that some dataviz applications, though, would be better served by raster tiles, since you'd end up generating a raster overlay anyways.
Many vector tile encoders have wide flexibility in geometry simplification/removal depending on zoom layer and this helps big time with tile size. I find them to be quite nice in lower bandwidth situations because you can overzoom them and still have them look good: if you zoom in and the tiles for the next zoom level haven't loaded, the vector geometry is still able to look decent, rather than pixellated like a raster tile.
What I can tell you is that my vector slippymap XHR is requesting .pbf files, so that would definitely imply protobuffers as the wire format. Ultimately that's using t-rex and mapbox-gl.js, so... not sure if there's something intermediate. But the mapbox docs say sqlite? I'm just very confused now.
I've used spatialite, and even though the doc is poor, I've managed to do things with it, and it works fine.
I'm not sure I can generate tiles with QGIS and spatialite.
It's true that open source GIS software is not easy to find, since GIS is not easy in the first place.
You don't need everything, you just provide the areas you want and layer accordingly
I'm on my mobile typing this but hopefully that's enough to get you started.
It should probably take less than a day. There's certainly nuanced GIS wonkiness, let's not pretend otherwise. But when I did set up a tile server I remember it being one of those things you think you simply cannot do without taking like 6 months of cartography night school, but then 45 minutes later it's done.
The domain specific knowledge requirements for standard usage required lightly scanning a couple Wikipedia pages. nothing serious.
1) Download a region from geofabrik. 2) Extract, transform and load the data into pgsql with osm2pgsql. I use the osm2pgsql flex mode. QGis can load osm extracts direcly, but the resulting layers have many errors in the details and using pgsql is much faster while viewing and rendering. Imposm is also a good alternative to osmpgsql. 3) Use QGis for styling the map. 4) Generate static tiles with https://docs.qgis.org/3.10/en/docs/user_manual/processing_al... (With DPI 250 and a tilesize of 512x512 for use on high resolution screens.) 5) Upload the tiles to my own server. 6) Load the tiles in OSMAnd as a custom map.
Qgis has a build in tile server https://www.qgis.org/de/site/about/features.html#qgis-server and leaflet can load the tiles via https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.6.0.html#tilelayer-wms . But this does not work for OSMAnd.
QGis can also create beautiful print maps with the "Atlas" feature.
But loading data directly from a osm.pbf or loading data via the QGis QuickOSM plugin into a spatialite file gives two problems:
1) You can not transform the data to fit your personal usage. Raw osm data is not nice to work with.
2) I had many problems with areas stored as relations (example: islands in lakes) and relation handling overall is a mess.
For the first steps and to toy around osm data in spatialite works. But don't fear osm2pgsql. For standard use cases it's a oneliner.
See: https://cesium.com/docs/tutorials/uploading/
Would love to hear your feedback.