Design proposal: Layer type square (and maybe other shapes)

[BezBIS]

Motivation

I'm new to maplibre so could well be missing something, but can't see this as an option in the documentation.

I'm trying to render a map where we have records with different levels of precision. The existing soluton shows high precision records as a circle and lower precision records as a larger sqaure. It would be really nice to be able to specify a square or rectangle as the layer type in the same way as you can currently use circle.

I have no idea what the technical implementation of this would look like, but hope it would not bee too complicatd as it's still a simple plolygon.

Design Alternatives

Do nothing.

Implementation

Something like this:

map.addLayer({
            id: 'points',
            type: 'rectangle',
            source: 'points',
            paint: {
                'rectangle-color': #e00,
                'rectangle-width': 12,
                'rectangle-height': 12,
                'rectangle-stroke-width': 1,
                'rectangle-stroke-color': '#000'
            }
        });

[HarelM]

You can use sdf icons in theory, but if we add something like that I would recommend a rectangle with rounded corners to facilitate a lot more shapes...

[BezBIS]

You can use sdf icons in theory, but if we add something like that I would recommend a rectangle with rounded corners to facilitate a lot more shapes...

A rounded rectnagle would be really useful. I'm not sure how many other people would benefit from something like this though, it could well be rather niche.

[HarelM]

You also might be able to pull this off by using a custom layer...?

[wadclapp]

I'm also looking for this feature, also don't know how complicated it would be to implement.

Desirably I'd like to be able to use an n-sided polygon as the background of a marker instead of a circle (triangle/square/pentagon), and possibly more, such as a star-shape. I have a lot of bg-colour/icon combos, which are also dynamic, so it isn't practical to add them all in the image sprite.

I achieved this originally as HTML markers, but I have too many markers now where it's no longer a performant way to achieve it.

[HarelM]

I've moved this to the style-spec repo for further discussion.