We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

TileMill and the Tower of Prince Henry, Reversed

Formal Metadata

Title
TileMill and the Tower of Prince Henry, Reversed
Title of Series
Number of Parts
188
Author
License
CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language
Producer
Production Year2014
Production PlacePortland, Oregon, United States of America

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
Programs that generate map tiles default to generating tiles for abounding box whose dimensions are fixed up and down the zoom stack. Butthe overarchingly common use case calls this default behavior intoquestion. If the ultimate goal of a map is to lock down the display of afeature at a high zoom level, then any tile outside of the invertedpyramid whose truncated top bounds the feature at the desired zoom levelis extraneous, unnecessary.Inspired by a game of marbles that uses a similar shape in its playing,I call this truncated, inverted pyramid the "Tower of Prince Henry,Reversed"[1], and abbreviate it TOPHR.This presentation describes modifications to TileMill, the same strategyimplemented directly through Mapnik XML, the use of the flexible mbtileformat to store the generated tiles, and presents several measures ofthe resulting savings (tile generation time, number of tiles, diskspace). I'll also describe a plug in for Leaflet and an approach forOpenLayers that ensures that map users cannot stray outside the boundsof TOPHR.1. It's also reminiscent of the name of a real album by The Fall or an unreal tarot card.
Keywords