Mapbox-gl-js: Cannot use text-field layers on third party maps

[daumann]

Apparently drawing text labels is only possible if using a Mapbox basemap?

When using another map provider (such as stamen or osm), upon adding a layer which uses text-field, it throws:

Error: layers.symbols.layout.text-field: use of "text-field" requires a style "glyphs" property

Here is a working example with a mapbox vector tile source for the basemap:
http://jsfiddle.net/brianssheldon/wm18a33d/27/
And here is the same code, just with another basemap provider (here: osm, but same behavior with stamen):
http://jsfiddle.net/wm18a33d/38/

Is there a workaround? This would completely derail using mapbox-gl in my project if true.

[daumann]

adding "glyphs": "http://fonts.openmaptiles.org/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf" works.

[kannes]

For others getting stuck on this, you need to add the "glyphs" property on the same level as "sources" and "layers". And you need to use a provider that has the fonts you use. For example for Mapbox example derivations you probably want "glyphs": "mapbox://fonts/mapbox/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf".

[simison]

For OSM and other non Mapbox layers, see:

https://openmaptiles.org/docs/style/mapbox-gl-style-spec/
https://github.com/openmaptiles/fonts

They're served from Github via "glyphs": "https://fonts.openmaptiles.org/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf" where fontstack will be font name from https://github.com/openmaptiles/fonts/tree/gh-pages — for example "Open Sans Bold", when defined in your layer like so:

{
  // ...
  layout: {
    'text-font': ['Open Sans Bold'],
  },
}

[kolen]

You should add layers which render text only after main style is loaded, i.e. in map.on("styledata", …)