Files
TREK/wiki/Map-Settings.md
T
Maurice 44c92052a3 docs(wiki): bring the pages in line with 4.3.0
Every page was read against the code on dev. What changed:

- Pages that described 4.2 behaviour: satellite view on the vector maps,
  the mobile journal timeline, Collab with its fifth tab, the Review badge,
  clustered pins on the share page, the Leaflet preset list, the strict
  guard on fe80::/10, the invite link tools and their scopes, the Public
  API scope rules, the permission count in the plugin SDK.
- Features of this release that no page mentioned: videos in a journal
  entry, receipts on an expense, the Google transit backend, routing
  counters, the rating on a place, the navigation menu, car stops, the
  manual school holiday catalogue and its MCP tools, the Dawarich panel in
  the Atlas, the release notes modal, plugin frames going fullscreen, the
  corridor call into the search provider hook.
- Statements that sent an admin the wrong way: DEFAULT_LANGUAGE is not in
  the Helm ConfigMap, env.PORT cannot be changed on the chart alone, the
  rotation script does not cover the document sync credentials, event
  handlers cannot broadcast, there is no per user MFA reset in the admin
  panel, the demo user can edit, an unparsable APP_URL stops the server.
- Updating gets a section for 4.3.0: the TREK Places API as the new
  default, the new variables, the Overpass timeout, SSO sessions on an
  OIDC only instance, the migration that puts booked nights on the drive.
2026-09-20 12:11:41 +02:00

9.8 KiB

Map Settings

The Map tab controls which map engine and tile source TREK uses in the Trip Planner and Journey maps.

Note: The Atlas view always uses Leaflet regardless of this setting.

Map Settings

Where to find it

Open the user menu in the top navigation bar, select Settings, then the Map tab. Unlike the General tab, changes here are not saved as you make them — click Save Map when you are done.

Map provider

Choose the rendering engine:

Provider Description
Leaflet Classic 2D renderer. Works with any raster tile URL. No token.
Mapbox GL (Experimental) Vector tiles with 3D buildings and terrain support. Requires a Mapbox access token.
MapLibre GL Vector tiles from OpenFreeMap. No access token required — this is the reason to pick it over Mapbox GL.

Each GL provider stores its style in its own slot (mapbox_style for Mapbox GL, maplibre_style for MapLibre GL), so switching providers never clobbers the other one's style.

Leaflet — tile source

When Leaflet is selected, pick a preset or enter a custom tile URL.

Built-in presets:

Name URL
OpenStreetMap https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
OpenStreetMap DE https://tile.openstreetmap.de/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
OpenFreeMap Positron https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron
OpenFreeMap Bright https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/bright
CartoDB Light (needs a key) https://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/light_all/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png
CartoDB Dark (needs a key) https://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/dark_all/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png
Stadia Smooth https://tiles.stadiamaps.com/tiles/alidade_smooth/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png

OpenFreeMap Positron is the default and is what every map falls back to when the field is empty. It needs no key, no account and has no request limit, and it is a MapLibre style rather than an XYZ template — TREK renders it with MapLibre inside the Leaflet map, so markers, routes and clusters behave exactly as before.

You can also type any XYZ tile URL, or the URL of any MapLibre style document, directly into the text field.

Admin: The admin can set a default map tile URL for all new users via the User Defaults tab in the Admin Panel. See Admin-Panel-Overview.

CARTO API key

Since 26 August 2026 CARTO stamps an API KEY REQUIRED watermark onto every basemap tile fetched without a key, so both CartoDB presets need one. This is why CARTO is no longer the default; you only need this section if you deliberately want the CartoDB look back. The key is free and no CARTO account is required: request it at carto.com/basemaps/apikey with an email address, the domain you run TREK on and a one-line description of your project. It arrives by mail, there is no approval queue. The free allowance is 5 million tile requests per calendar month.

Paste it into CARTO API key in Settings, Map. TREK appends it as ?key=... to every CARTO tile request, which covers the Trip Planner, Journey maps, Collections, Atlas, Studio and the offline tile download in one go. The key is never stored inside the tile URL itself, so switching keys later does not break a saved template.

Admin: User Defaults in the Admin Panel has the same field as Shared CARTO key. It applies to every user who has not entered one of their own, which clears the watermark for the whole instance at once. It is stored encrypted at rest.

Other providers are unaffected, and a keyless CARTO template is treated as "not configured" so the map falls back to OpenFreeMap instead of drawing watermarked tiles. Save a key and your template is kept as you entered it.

Offline pre-download works on every built-in preset: OpenFreeMap, CARTO, the Amap presets, Stadia Smooth and the two OpenStreetMap presets. The OpenStreetMap tile servers do not permit bulk downloading under their usage policy, so for a trip you keep offline prefer OpenFreeMap, CARTO with a key or the Amap presets.

Amap (高德地图) basemap

Two presets: 高德地图 (Amap) for the road map and 高德卫星 (Amap Satellite) for imagery. They need no key and no account, and inside mainland China they are far better than anything else in the list: OpenStreetMap and OpenFreeMap are sparse there, and the foreign tile CDNs are slow or unreachable.

These tiles are drawn in GCJ-02, an offset datum, while every coordinate in TREK is WGS-84. TREK handles that for you: a map on an Amap basemap switches to a shifted projection, so markers, routes, clusters and the coordinates you get from clicking the map all stay where they belong, on the planner map and on the journey map alike. Nothing is stored differently, only the drawing changes.

Two consequences worth knowing:

  • The satellite toggle follows the basemap. On an Amap basemap it shows Amap imagery rather than Esri's, because mixing the two datums on one map would move the photo a few hundred metres out from under the markers.
  • Amap has no coverage outside China. A trip to Lisbon on an Amap basemap gets a nearly empty map, so this is a choice for instances whose trips are mostly domestic.

Place search via Amap is a separate setting from the basemap, see Places and Search and Environment Variables.

Mapbox GL — access token and style

Enter your public token (pk.*) from mapbox.com → Access tokens.

Required scopes are:

  • STYLES:TILES
  • STYLES:READ
  • FONTS:READ
  • DATASETS:READ
  • VISION:READ

If Mapbox GL is selected but no token is saved, TREK falls back to the Leaflet renderer, so the Trip Planner and Journey maps keep working. Only the preview on this settings page stays blank, with the note Enter a Mapbox access token to preview.

Built-in style presets:

Style Tags
Mapbox Standard 3D, Apple-like
Standard Satellite 3D, Satellite
Streets 3D, Classic
Outdoors 3D, Terrain
Light 3D, Minimal
Dark 3D, Dark
Satellite 3D, Satellite
Satellite Streets 3D, Satellite
Navigation Day 3D, Apple-like
Navigation Night 3D, Dark

You can also enter a custom mapbox://styles/USER/ID URL directly.

3D Buildings & Terrain

Enables pitch and 3D buildings on all styles. Mapbox Standard and Standard Satellite ship their own building volumes, so TREK adds no extrusion layer there; every other style gets one injected. Terrain elevation (DEM-based height) is additionally applied on Satellite, Satellite Streets and Outdoors; Standard Satellite brings its own terrain from Mapbox and is left alone. The remaining styles get buildings but no terrain — including plain Mapbox Standard, whose built-in terrain TREK switches off — because the elevation data would cause route lines to visually drift away from the HTML place markers.

High Quality Mode (Experimental)

Enables antialiasing and globe projection for sharper edges. May impact performance on lower-end devices.

MapLibre GL — style

MapLibre GL renders OpenFreeMap vector tiles and needs no token at all, so there is no token field on this provider — just a style.

Built-in style presets:

Style URL
OpenFreeMap Liberty (default) https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/liberty
OpenFreeMap Bright https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/bright
OpenFreeMap Positron https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron

You can also type any https://tiles.openfreemap.org/… style URL. A style that is not an OpenFreeMap URL is rejected and replaced with Liberty when you save.

The 3D Buildings & Terrain and High Quality Mode toggles are Mapbox-only and are not shown for MapLibre GL.

Where a map opens

There is no default map center or zoom setting — it was removed in v3.4.0. Instead, every map works out its own opening camera from the places it is about to draw, so a trip in Japan opens on Japan instead of starting on the world view and then flying across the planet.

For each trip map — Trip Planner, Collections and shared-trip links — TREK takes the coordinates it is given and computes the center and zoom that frame them all (the Journey maps frame themselves with the renderer's own fitBounds, capped at zoom 16 on both engines):

  • Several places — the camera fits their bounding box. The zoom is capped (16 on Leaflet, 15 on the GL renderers) so a tight cluster does not open absurdly far in, and the center is taken in projected (Mercator) space rather than as an average of the latitudes, so the northernmost place does not fall out of frame.
  • A single place (or several stacked on the same spot) — there is no extent to fit, so it opens at city level: zoom 12 on Leaflet, 11 on the GL renderers.
  • Places spanning the date line — MapLibre GL and Mapbox GL wrap the world, so a trip covering Fiji and Samoa is framed as the 10°-wide arc it really is. Leaflet does not wrap, so it takes the plain west-to-east span instead.
  • Side panels — chrome overlaying the map shifts the center, so the places stay inside the part of the map you can actually see.
  • No usable coordinates — a brand-new trip with nothing placed yet has nothing to frame, so the map falls back to a world view (center 0, 0 at zoom 2).

The small map preview on this settings page is the exception: it stays on a fixed city (Paris) — zoom 16 on the two GL previews, city-level zoom 12 under Leaflet — so you can judge label density, 3D buildings and satellite texture. It is not a setting and no real map opens there.

See also