Is it possible to add a watermark in MapBox vector tiles? - mapbox

A client would like to add their URL as a brand/watermark within a MapBox tiled vector layer in MapBox Studio, so that the watermark appears wherever the tiled vector layer is displayed. (One possible use-case is to discourage competitors from stealing that tiled layer in their own maps.)
Is it possible to add a watermark to a tiled layer in MapBox, and ensure that it's visible at least once in every view?
I tried adding a duplicate copy of a polyline dataset as a Symbol Layer, and labelling it with the client's URL using the Text Field option. This works but has the side effect of preventing the labels from appearing on the original copy of the line layer.

It is not possible to add a single occurrence of a watermark to a map style in Studio in the way that the Mapbox watermark is displayed on a map, but there are alternative approaches to achieve what you are looking to do.
If the underlying goal is to prevent competitors from using a particular map style (and hence an underlying tiled layer), the best approach is to set scopes and URL restrictions on the Mapbox access tokens being used to access the map style in a public environment. You can find more useful information about token management and access tokens in general in the Mapbox documentation. This approach could be used in conjunction with adding a branded "watermark" on the client side -- for example, placing a fixed div in the corner of a web map loaded with GL JS. Although this watermark obviously isn't included in the style itself, setting a URL restriction on the access token used to load the map would prevent others from accessing the same map with that token on other domains.
You could also experiment with adding a low-opacity background-pattern to relevant layers in the map style itself. This property could be used to mimic a traditional watermarked effect, where a particular logo is placed on an image at multiple regular intervals.

Related

How to write text onto a mapbox vector tile

I want to label stations on my map, and I would like to clusterize the stops at different zoom levels to filter them down. So as you zoom out all you get is the start and end, and then finally a single label start->end.
How do I render a text label on a vector tile ?
I could fetch the stations as a geojson and reload on zoom change if there's no easy way to do this with tiles.
Is there a reason you need to encode your data differently per-zoom-level in the tiles or are you mainly concerned with displaying data differently per-zoom-level? If the latter, I would recommend looking for an approach that focuses more on styling the vector tiles you already have rather than trying to generate those tiles in a more complex fashion. You could try using a zoom function to style your data. If you're using Mapbox Studio, you can also set zoom-specific style rules in the Studio UI, which is the route you'll probably want to go if you're using Leaflet (I see the Leaflet tag in your post but it's not entirely clear what your implementation looks like).
If the former, you may need to use a tool like Tippecanoe. This route will likely be a bit more complex, but gives you fine-grained control over how your vector tiles are generated. Keep in mind that once you've created your tiles using Tippecanoe, you'll still need to style them somehow.

Custom drawing layer in Mapbox GL JS (and Leaflet)

I'm starting research to add a user feature to an existing map built in Mapbox GL JS (wrapped in an Angular 2+ application). What I need to do, is allow a user to be able to draw and rotate ellipses and text labels over the top of a map, and be able to save screen captures of the result.
I'm coming into this with no experience in Mapbox or Leaflet, so I have a lot to figure out. My first goal is to determine if I can do this in Mapbox directly (with a plugin?), of if I will need to render a canvas over the top of my map with some third-part drawing library (I have a lot of experience with those).
The obvious advantage to doing this in Mapbox directly would be that we might still be able zoom and pan.
The Mapbox-gl-draw library lets the user author features in a map, but probably not to the extent you need.
If the features the user creates don't need to live "in map space" (ie, the map is static, and the labels are statically positioned over the top, for printing), working directly on a canvas will give you much more flexibility. You'll also have access to a much wider variety of libraries.

Mapbox GL / style - data separation

I have played with Mapbox and can quite easily create a Choropleth map in Mapbox studio and interact with it in Javascript.
I would like to create Choropleth map of the states with the ability to change the colours of the states for 100 years of different data points. I'm not allowed to upload the data into Mapbox as its sensitive healthcare data and I can't get sign of for the $499 a month cost.
My idea is I create a mapbox style layer in MapBox Studio then push the data client side for each of the states depending on the year x that the user selects. I have seen quite a few cloropeth tutorials such as this https://www.mapbox.com/help/choropleth-studio-gl-pt-1/ but the data is added in through a layer in Mapbox Studio. My thoughts are to embed the large GeoJson in the style and only push the data to the Polygon ID's, whilst creating transtions between the two.
Does anyone have any ideas if this is possible? and perhaps any useful API requests which may help me achieve this https://www.mapbox.com/api-documentation/.
It's possible. There are two approaches:
Upload the geometry as a Dataset in Studio, or load it directly as a GeoJSON.
Set data attributes directly on the geometry.
Create a style with data-driven styles (eg, map "47" to "rgb(100,0,0)" and "153" to "rgb(250,250,0)" and let Mapbox interpolate.
Or:
Upload the geometry as a Tileset to Studio.
Calculate the color you want to represent each possible value of each state.
Generate a data-driven style property that maps each state's code to the color you want, like ...['FL','rgb(143,15,0)']....
Neither method will cope with large numbers of regions, but should be ok for 50 US states at low resolution.
More discussion here: https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/4261

Mapbox: show only one country on base map?

I'm using Mapbox GL JS. Is there any way I can style my base layer to look like the Mapbox Light example, but showing only the UK?
I assume I would use Mapbox Studio to build my own base layer, but I can't see any way in Studio to filter by country.
If that's not possible, is there any way I could show labels on the UK only, and show other countries as filled polygons? (As per this unanswered question.)
Unfortunately it is not possible to filter by a certain geography when selecting the data source for a layer. If you're working with Mapbox's tiles, they'll always cover the entire planet.
There is the possibility to restrict the map to a certain (rectangular) bounds, with the map.setMaxBounds method (https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/api/#Map#setMaxBounds). This might work reasonably well since you want to restrict the view to the UK, but might not be suitable depending on the geometry you want to restrict the view to.
As a workaround you could create a dataset and add a polygon that covers the entire planet except for the extent you want to show in your map. Then add this dataset in your style as the top most layer and style it with whatever you'd like the empty space in your map to look like.
The workaround has been also suggested in this SO answer, if you can get maptiles for the UK only (the SO answer gives a link, but for Germany) you can
upload them to Mapbox as a dataset, export it to tilesets, and then
to a map as a layer. Delete all other layers
You have also the possibility to Style a single country in Mapbox
studio ref this tutorial. The other countries are still shown, but you can style your map in a way to highlight UK
There is a option that allows you to show only one country highlighted. But drawback is, you lose all the layers and tile-level details. Here is the link https://www.mapbox.com/videos/how-to/map-a-single-country-in-mapbox-studio/.
But if you want to include the tile details as well as whole world map but in that map only one or two or custom amount of countries highlighted, then, from above link of Natural Earth download the zipped file of ne_10m_admin_0_countries and upload.
Go back to your map style, and instead of making a blank one. Add another layer of ne_10m_admin_0_countries in your current map. Select the country in the filter option (in same way as shown in video). And change its opacity. That's it.
Hope it helps. Have a great day.

Anyway to overcome the 5 custom icon urls per request?

From the Google Image API documentation
Static Maps service allows up to five unique custom icons per request. Note that each of these unique icons may be used multiple times within the static map
I have more than 5 custom icons per request, maybe up to 40.
Is there a way to overcome this? Is it possible to use sprites in static maps to overcome this?
Here's how I got around this:
You probably already know how, and depending on your source it's going to be different anyway, but collect up all your map data. Required bits are going to be: center point, zoom, map type, and output image size. I am going to assume sensor (if the application has access to GPS) is false. Also you are going to need all of your marker information which will include the icon you are going to use, and the geo coordinates of them.
I POSTed this all to the CF page that is going to make all the magic happen.
Map your first 5 points as normal. Get the results as a .png
Map your next 5 points but add "style=feature:all|visibility:off" to the query string, get result as a .png. This will give you a png with a transparent background but will have all of your marker icons on it. It will be the same size as your initial map, and the markers will be placed correctly withing that rectangle.
Watermark that image on top of your initial map. NOTE: this step is probably going to vary the most depending on your language of choice and what image manipulation features it offers.
Repeat 4 and 5 until you have all of your markers.
Write out you image with all of the markers now on it.
Serve up a link to that file instead of using the normal google link.
I have a more detailed explanation here with some code example in ColdFusion.