Cartographer's Toolkit

I’ve produced two more tutorials for the TileMill series. We’re still covering the basics here. If you missed the first (badly produced) one, you can look at it here:

That’s One Short Tutorial: TileMill

I promise better production quality in these two follow-ups, produced with camstudio and my nice studio mic. Transcript summaries follow!

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Transcript Summary for Intro to TileMill 2: Adding Layers

Click on the Add Layers box in the lower left of the project window. There are lots of different file types supported by TileMill including CSV, shapefile, geojson, KML, GeoTiff, SQLite, and PostGIS. In this tutorial we use a GeoTiff from www.naturalearthdata.com of hypsometric tinting (elevation tinting). Natural Earth is a good place to get data if you don’t have any map data yet or if you need to add some data layers to your collection. The data is free.

In the ID box of the Add Layer dialog you name the dataset that you’re adding. (Note: if you don’t put anything in that box TileMill will put something in there fore you.) We’re going to call our layer “Tinting.” That’s how it’s going to be referenced in the code. You aren’t required to put anything in the Class box. The only reason you would use it is if you have several data layers that are all describing the same sort of thing. For example, you could have a U.S. road layer, a Euro roads layer, and a world roads layer. For those three layers you could give them all the Class name of “roads” and then use “.roads” to reference them all at the same time in the code if you want them all to have the same styling (e.g. they all would be black and width=1). We won’t use the Class box today.

In the Datasource box, the only required box, you put the path to the dataset. You can use the browse button to browse for the dataset. Here I’ve just copied and pasted it in. (Incidentally: when I was doing a production level TileMill project a few months ago I had a notepad file open where I would put all these parameters so I could easily copy and paste them in while troubleshooting. Especially nice for the PostGIS tab which has more complex info to put in.)

SRS stands for Spatial Reference System. This is basically the projection that your data is in. You can use Autodetect, which works most of the time. I happen to know that my data is in WGS84, that’s because I took a look at the ReadMe file that came with the Natural Earth data that I downloaded and it told me that the projection was WGS84.

We’re going to leave the Advanced box empty and click Save & Style. If you just click Save, it’s not going to style your data for you in the code. So it’s a little easier when you’re just starting out to press Save & Style. And then magically you’ll see that it’s put my layer in the layer list and it’s also referenced in the code right here with some default styling. It’s also covered up the rest of my data with this greenish color. You can see the data a lot better if I zoom out, then you can see the hypsometric tinting dataset that I downloaded.

Transcript Summary for Intro To TileMill 3: Adding Comments

In this tutorial we’re going to start off with the hypsometric tinting layer showing, that we added in the previous tutorial, and learn about how to add comments to the code. The code on the right is called CartoCSS. Knowing how to comment things is pretty important.

Let’s start with just a basic comment. In part of this code I have a “marker-allow-overlap” parameter set to “true,” which is an uncommon thing to do. So you might want to make a comment to the effect of why you overrode it. It’s pretty easy to do, you just use a forward-slash star combination at the beginning of the comment and a star forward-slash combination at the end of the comment so it looks like this:

/*Override the default layer*/

Another reason that you might want to comment the CartoCSS code is that these stylesheets can get very long. You can visually separate different sections of the stylesheets by putting in section separators like this:

/*————LABELS————–*/

Whatever you put in between the /* and */ is just a comment. Another reason you might want to comment is to put a nice looking header at the top so that people understand who wrote it, when, and whatever other metadata information you want up there.

/***********************

* PetersonGIS

* 12/4/2013

************************/

A fourth, very commonly used, reason to comment is to get rid of data in the map without actually deleting the styling. So if I want to make the hysometric tinting dataset not show up in the map but still have the CartoCSS code for it in the stylesheet, I can go ahead and put that /* and */ to comment it out. This is great for debugging when you aren’t sure what is breaking the map. The comments can help you figure out what’s going wrong. Also, if you’re going to be exporting slightly different maps to different customers, you can comment out map layers prior to rendering the tiles. (Note: you could also do this another way, by clicking the eye icon next to the layer name in the layers dialog, which effectively makes it disappear without actually deleting it or the code.)