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by mourner 1404 days ago
Nice tutorial! Brace yourself for the next step (text rendering and label placement) — this is way more difficult than it may seem at first, and contributes to a lot of complexity in Mapbox GL JS.
1 comments

Yeah, that’s precisely why I didn’t tackle that. I was wondering though, does it render text in GL on the web, or leverage the DOM? (I’m just using absolute positioning for the tile labels)
They’re drawn in WebGL using signed distance fields.

https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-text-with-signed-distance-fi...

It renders in WebGL with SDFs, but rendering is a small part of the problem — placing labels along paths including curved ones, avoiding collisions etc. gets very complex very fast.