How Tippecanoe makes Felt’s polygons look good, part 2: preventing shard gaps

Felt has integrated Tippecanoe, an open-source tool for creating vector map tiles, to enhance the visualization of geographic data by addressing algorithmic challenges such as choosing label points for polygons and simplifying contiguous polygons without creating gaps. While existing solutions like TopoJSON address these issues, Tippecanoe's approach involves sorting input spatial data to efficiently manage large datasets without relying on in-memory structures. Recent improvements focus on topology-aware polygon simplification by sorting vertices and identifying critical nodes to prevent oversimplification, ensuring that shared borders are consistently maintained. Despite these advancements, challenges remain with polygon cleaning, which can introduce minor spatial inaccuracies due to necessary adjustments for self-intersections. Tippecanoe continues to evolve, with users encouraged to test its capabilities and provide feedback for further refinement.