Add standard icons and glyphs to all Mapbox styles

[lucaswoj]

We get so many support requests like mapbox/mapbox-gl-js#1999 that it would make sense to to add a standard set of icons (Maki) and glyphs to all Mapbox-provided styles.

Thoughts @lyzidiamond @danswick @jfirebaugh @samanpwbb @xrwang @peterqliu?

[jfirebaugh]

👍

Icons and glyphs.

[lyzidiamond]

Yes. All maki icons available in all template styles is a great idea. Also all glyphs. Yes.

[peckjon]

+1 this would be incredibly helpful

[samanpwbb]

I think it'd be wrong to give users the impression that maki was somehow built into Mapbox styles. There is a problem here, and it's that sprites are just inherently complicated to understand, not that styles don't come with default sprites. If we did have default sprites, the icons in them wouldn't be modifiable (unless we added SDF support or https://github.com/mapbox/maki-chef/ support to the style api) and it's not possible to find an icon style that would work for any map style.

Eventually, it'd be nice to soften this problem by making it easy to add a variety of pre-made icon sets to styles while leaving default sprites as-is through a UI in studio. Sprites should only contain the images that the map style uses.

[nickidlugash]

Agree with @samanpwbb. We have several different designs of maki icons across our different templates, and it doesn't make sense to replace them all with a default set. Maki is a customizable system, and our templates wouldn't demonstrate this.

Also, I don't think it makes sense for all customer styles made from our templates to have hundreds of potentially unused sprites. We've been working hard to minimize sprint bloat, and this goes against that.

What does it mean to add all glyphs? Are we talking about including all the fontstacks used across all the styles in every style?

[jfirebaugh]

We are continuing to get issues filed about this. It's something that commonly trips people up and is easily addressable by adding a default icon set to styles that don't already have one. We should just do it.

If we did have default sprites, the icons in them wouldn't be modifiable

Users who run into the issue don't usually care about modifiability; they just want some icon to be available. If they do care about modifiability, we point them to Studio. Adding defaults doesn't make the situation any worse, and it helps a significant number of users.

it doesn't make sense to replace them all with a default set

We're not suggesting replacing them all with a default set, we're suggesting adding defaults to styles that don't have any icons.

[jfirebaugh]

Concretely, here's what I suggest we do:

• Symlink sprites/satellite-v8 to sprites/satellite-hybrid-v8 and check in the symlink

• Add to satellite-v8.json:

  "sprite": "mapbox://sprites/mapbox/satellite-v8",
  "glyphs": "mapbox://fonts/mapbox/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf",
  

• Put out a point release, update the Styles API

[samanpwbb]

I'm on board with that. We're planning to do a big release as part of streets-v7 soon, so we can probably fit this in, cc: @amyleew @nickidlugash.

[nickidlugash]

👍

[lyzidiamond]

Hmm. What about light-v8 and dark-v8?

[amyleew]

@jfirebaugh @samanpwbb - satellite-v8.json updated for Studio merge #256

/cc @lucaswoj

[jfirebaugh]

@samanpwbb @nickidlugash Would you be ok with adding a default set of markers to light and dark as well?

[amyleew]

@jfirebaugh - 👍 Working on default set for light and dark.

/cc @samanpwbb @nickidlugash

[amyleew]

Added.

[peterbodo]

Is there any reference to the new icons?

I use streets v8 and I cannot see new icons, but many disappeared (which I have used to show search results, navigation starting points and destinations.
I just used circle and star, not because they where perfect, but it is really terribly painful to do it another way.
I cannot add an additional sprite to the style, and I don't want to rebuild the whole street sprite just to have two icons.
I would be happy with simple circle markers, but cannot add text labels.

So, it would be so cool if custom markers could be added to the map (BTW one of the most basic use case of map solutions), or at least having some non-specific icons in all sprites.

[hdrdavies]

+1 to @peterbodo comment

[lucaswoj]

@peterbodo @hdrdavies see #302 😄

[hdrdavies]

@lucaswoj that is really awesome, so thank you.

Can people go somewhere to find these listed? I had to dig around in my dev tools today to see which ones were available and try them one by one!

[lucaswoj]

@hdrdavies We're working a reference table in #318 😄

[hdrdavies]

Awesome! @lucaswoj 😄

[hdrdavies]

@lucaswoj there's a couple of icons which would probably be very much welcomed by developers e.g. a person icon - I note that these aren't in the Maki project. How do you think this could be resolved?

[xrwang]

@hdrdavies, for maki icon requests please feel free to file an issue in the Maki repo, i.e. mapbox/maki#281. If there is an icon that you have made and would like to add in, see https://www.mapbox.com/maki-icons/guidelines/. Thank you!

[hdrdavies]

thank you @xrwang !

[melroy89]

Well so Font Awesome is blocked by Maki devs themselves:
mapbox/maki#244

So I added Font Awesome to the OpenMapTiles fonts (gh-pages branch):
openmaptiles/fonts#9

Let's hope this gets finally fixed.

[PhloxDev]

use this library:
https://github.com/mattdesl/image-sdf
generate png icons to SDF