Agents ship the same default MapLibre look everywhere.

Pick one named taste, check a MapLibre style against that school, and use its tokens. Not one shared palette.

npx maptaste check style.json --taste ink-paper

Tastes

Taste	School	What stays different with the colors removed
ink-paper	Print cartography	Flat plate, hairline roads, no casings, roman labels. --pack global
night-ops	Dark operations	Extruded buildings, bold type, steep pitch, major roads, contrast ≥ 7
civic	Open-data choropleth	North-up plan, boundaries heavier than streets, admin labels
editorial	Magazine story map	Street network removed, one italic headline, ≤ 3 text layers, ≤ 2 line layers
cn-metro	Chinese city and transit	Thick routes, minor streets hidden, bold admin labels. --pack cn
terrain-quiet	Hillshade	Relief frame, roads nearly gone, translucent fills, muted ground

npx maptaste tastes
npx maptaste tokens --taste editorial
npx maptaste example --taste night-ops
npx maptaste apply --taste civic

tastes lists the catalog. tokens --taste prints that school's colors and the rules sentence the checker uses. example --taste prints a style that scores 100 under that taste. apply --taste writes <taste>.tokens.json and <taste>.style.json (default directory maptaste/). Each taste is a plate: which roads stay, roman or bold or one italic headline, flat or extruded, plus the color tokens. Swapping a color array onto the same street atlas is not the taste.

Pack aliases

--pack	Taste
global	ink-paper
cn	cn-metro

--pack still works. --taste and --pack together are an error when they name different schools. With neither flag, the check is ink-paper.

Check

npx maptaste check style.json --taste civic
npx maptaste check style.json --pack cn
npx maptaste check style.json --taste cn-metro --format json

Node 20 or newer. The rules are heuristics. Render the map before trusting a score.

From a checkout:

pnpm install
pnpm build
node dist/cli.js check test/fixtures/bad-style.json --taste ink-paper

That fixture prints:

ERROR MT001 layers[1].paint.fill-color: Rainbow choropleth obscures ordering; use a restrained sequential or diverging scale.
WARN MT002 layers[2].paint: Low-contrast labels need a contrasting halo or stronger text color.
…
INFO MT003 metadata: Missing dark-mode consideration; provide a dark background or declare theme variants in metadata.
WARN MT004 layers: ink-paper allows 8 text layers; this style has 10. Prioritize places by zoom and reduce large default text sizes.
WARN MT006 layers[1].paint.fill-color: ink-paper keeps fills quiet; a fill here is past saturation 0.55.
WARN MT007 layers[1].paint.fill-color: ink-paper uses a sequential scale; fill lightness should move in one direction.
Taste: ink-paper
Score: 50/100 — 1 errors, 13 warnings, 1 info

The skipped lines are the same MT002 warning on layers[3] through layers[11].

Exit 0 when no finding is an error, 1 when any finding is an error, 2 when the file or the flags are invalid. Warnings and info are printed and leave the exit code at 0. --format json prints { findings, score, summary, taste }.

The score starts at 100. Each error subtracts 10, each warning 3, each info 1, with a floor of 0. Colors read: #rgb, #rrggbb, rgb(), and white, black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, cyan, including those literals inside an expression. rgba(), hsl(), zoom, and feature counts are ignored. Stroke width and text size are read only when they are plain numbers.

import { check } from 'maptaste';

const result = check({ version: 8, layers: [] }, { taste: 'civic' });

{ pack: 'global' } checks ink-paper. { pack: 'cn' } checks cn-metro.

Skills

npx skills add FelixFangX/maptaste --skill maptaste

maptaste is the selector: it lists the six tastes and tells the agent to check with --taste. maptaste-global is the ink-paper alias (--pack global). maptaste-cn is the cn-metro alias (--pack cn).

npx skills add FelixFangX/maptaste --skill maptaste-global
npx skills add FelixFangX/maptaste --skill maptaste-cn

Or copy skills/maptaste into the agent's skills directory and tell it to follow that skill.

Rules

Caps below are the taste's own numbers (npx maptaste tokens --taste <name>). MT001 is an error in every taste.

ID	Default	Name	Heuristic
MT001	error	rainbow-choropleth	Fill colors span at least four saturated hue sectors
MT002	warn	label-contrast	Static label contrast is below the taste minimum (4.5, or 7 for night-ops)
MT003	info	dark-mode	No dark background or theme declaration in metadata
MT004	warn	label-density	More text layers than the taste allows, or 3 or more numeric text sizes of 24 or higher
MT005	warn, error on night-ops	ground	Background luminance disagrees with the taste (paper, night, or muted)
MT006	warn	fill-saturation	A fill color is more saturated than the taste allows
MT007	warn	class-discipline	Too many fill stops, or sequential lightness reverses
MT008	warn	label-hierarchy	Editorial only: more than one headline, or labels without a size step
MT009	warn	line-weight	A numeric line width is heavier than the taste's stroke cap
MT010	warn	fill-opacity	terrain-quiet only: a fill is too opaque for a hillshade to read
MT011	warn	line-chroma	Line colors span more hue sectors than the taste allows
MT012	warn	line-count	More line layers than the plate allows
MT013	warn	typeface	Declared text-font is bold or italic on a roman plate, or not the face that plate asks for

ink-paper allows 8 text layers and 6 line layers, set in roman. editorial allows 3 text layers, 2 line layers, and one italic headline. night-ops is bold. A style can pass one taste and fail another with the same colors, because the plate is different. Missing text-font is not a finding. A face that is set and wrong is.

Showcase

maptaste.ledring.dev

The first screen is the catalog: six tastes, each with a before ramp, that taste's after ramp, and a plate mark (stroke weight, label ranks). Choosing one opens the city study on that plate's camera. Before is the noisy rainbow atlas. After drops casings, minor streets, or the whole street network, changes the type, and — for night-ops — stands the buildings up. Terrain opens on the hillshade, not the towers. Classes, label size, label count, and stroke are knobs. Past the taste's cap, the score on the specimen drops.

Tiles, glyphs, and sprites come from OpenFreeMap with no API key. The page needs a network connection and WebGL. Attribution stays on the map.

Presets: San Francisco, Tokyo, 上海, 外滩, London, Paris. Other place names can be English, Chinese, or another local name. lang sets the caption language. Workers AI expands informal names, and names Nominatim misses or mismatches (2,000 per day, 40 per IP). Sessions are capped at 5,000 per day and 20 per IP.

• https://maptaste.ledring.dev/?taste=night-ops
• https://maptaste.ledring.dev/?place=Tokyo&taste=editorial
• https://maptaste.ledring.dev/?place=上海&taste=cn-metro
• https://maptaste.ledring.dev/?ll=139.7671,35.6812&place=Tokyo
• https://maptaste.ledring.dev/?place=Paris&lang=zh

Try check runs this same check against the selected taste, on the rainbow fixture, that taste's specimen, or style JSON you paste. Copy style copies the current city and camera as MapLibre style JSON.

cd showcase
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Deploy stays on Wrangler: pnpm deploy builds the showcase and runs wrangler deploy.

MCP

Published as maptaste@0.0.1.

npx -y maptaste mcp

Cursor or Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "maptaste": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "maptaste", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

maptaste-mcp is the same server (npx -y --package maptaste maptaste-mcp). From a checkout: pnpm install && pnpm build, then node dist/cli.js mcp or node dist/mcp/server.js.

• list_tastes returns the catalog: id, school, tokens, composition, and the rules sentence.
• check_taste takes { "style": {} } or { "styleJson": "..." }, plus optional taste and pack. The default taste is ink-paper.
• validate_style checks for an object with version and a layers array.
• preview_place takes place or ll (lng,lat), and optional zoom, mode (before or after), theme (light or dark), taste, and lang. It returns a https://maptaste.ledring.dev/ URL. A name is resolved in the browser, so center is null until then.
• preview_info points at the local showcase: cd showcase && pnpm install && pnpm dev.

0.0.1. Thresholds can change in any 0.x release. Input is MapLibre style JSON.

License

MIT.