{"id":79021,"date":"2017-08-17T07:51:02","date_gmt":"2017-08-17T07:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/uncategorized\/working-with-fonts-and-sprites-being-creative-with-esri-vector-tiles\/"},"modified":"2019-06-25T14:43:25","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T21:43:25","slug":"working-with-fonts-and-sprites-being-creative-with-esri-vector-tiles","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/mapping\/mapping\/working-with-fonts-and-sprites-being-creative-with-esri-vector-tiles","title":{"rendered":"Working with Fonts and Sprites: Being Creative with Esri Vector Tiles"},"author":4491,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":""},"categories":[22941],"tags":[23171,23201,23151,23161,33541,31131,33571],"industry":[],"product":[36551,36561],"class_list":["post-79021","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping","tag-basemaps","tag-cartographic-design","tag-map-services","tag-maps","tag-vector-basemaps","tag-vector-tile-layers","tag-vector-tile-package","product-arcgis-online","product-arcgis-pro"],"acf":{"short_description":"Updated December 8, 2017:\u00a0 The Esri Vector Basemaps were recently updated to a new version (v2). The best way to access them in ArcGIS O...","flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

For an interactive version of this blog click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Vector Tile Layers are used to create multi-scale maps that are efficient, high-resolution and customizable. Since they became available the Esri Living Atlas Content Team has built vector tile versions of most of our traditional basemaps, plus some new ones. And we had the opportunity to play around with them as well!\u00a0 We created a series of custom basemaps<\/a> that exploit various graphic effects:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can change our maps as well. The\u00a0Vector Tile Style Editor<\/a>\u00a0is making this work increasingly easy (see below), but there are still some limitations, and you may prefer to build your own basemap. For that, you need to go back to first principles …<\/p>\n

What are we building?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A published Vector Tile Map works best as a foundation. You cannot link to data from a Vector Tile Layer, so you should set it below (or possibly above) any interactive information that you\u2019re building. Let\u2019s call it a \u2018basemap\u2019 (which is what we build for ArcGIS Online), but it doesn\u2019t have to be just that.<\/p>\n

The simplest way of exploiting Vector Tiles is to work online with copies of our basemaps. You can change colors, lines, symbols and to some extent fonts. The fonts available have to be defined in the published Vector Tile Package, so we have added a few extra to our master tile set.<\/p>\n

The focus here though, is on taking the customization to another level, and that requires you to build your own map from original data.<\/p>\n

With What?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Find a data source. Remember that you are building a map that will support your subject, so you are most likely looking for different levels of relevant geographic information. The map will be established in ArcGIS Pro, exported to a vector tile package, then published as a vector tile layer.<\/p>\n

A vector tile package contains the vector tiles, and various formatting documents (In essence, the package is a zip file, so you can use an ‘Extract files’ command to ‘unzip’ it and look at the contents). Of interest to us is the Resources Folder, which includes:<\/p>\n