Tool to smooth a rough vector edge

[MikeW]

At the start of the thread I had traced the dog and placed in actual circles, combined the parts, created the wedge to chop out the appropriate part of the circle, etc. You can have the AD file...

 

Mike

 

hound-creative.afdesign

[christovw66]

Thanks a ton Mike, for both the file and the method you used.

 

Really appreciate it!

-Christo

[v_kyr]

@v_kyr: Do you get an excessive number of nodes using DragPotrace, like say dozens of sharp nodes on what is a straight line segment of a path?

 

In the meantime I've read the following related to potrace (which is used by the DragPotrace GUI-frontend and Inkscape) and the number of produced nodes, by the author of that cmdline tool ...

 

 

Question: How can I reduce the number of nodes in the output of Potrace?

 

Answer: Potrace already makes an attempt to reduce the number of nodes, and this behavior is controlled by the --opttolerance parameter (or can be turned off entirely with --longcurve). However, I have decided not to sacrifice quality for quantity, and Potrace will not reduce the number of nodes beyond what it considers tolerable.

 

For many applications, the problem of reducing output file size can be solved by reducing the resolution of the input image. This sounds too simple to be true, but can give surprisingly good results. One of the most common "beginner's mistakes" when using Potrace is to start with an image that contains too much detail or noise. Blurring the input image can also help, particularly with grey-scale images.

[christovw66]

Great info - thanks v_kyr.

 

-Christo

[v_kyr]

BTW for making comparison runs between the freeware/opensource vectorizers (autotrace and potrace) that old Java based Delineate 0.5 GUI tool is still usable after some slightly tweaking.

 

NOTE: I had to add to Delineate's libraries the xalan-2.7.1.jar package, since Delineate uses the Apache XPath API, but that was strangely missing in the distribution. Further I had to edit inside the delineate.jar the "META-INF\MANIFEST.MF" file accordingly, meaning adding a reference also to ./lib/xalan-2.7.1.jar inside. - After doing so that pretty old Java based tool works still fine again and when you start/run it you have just once to point it to the cmdline executables of potrace and autotrace, so it knows and preserves where to find these!

 

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I'm actually progging on a little Win based GUI for potrace, so I can use that then for making more quickly personal needed SVGs out of bitmaps.

[christovw66]

Great information v_kyr, thanks again for sharing it.

 

I learn a bit from every single response - really benefiting from your input.

 

-Christo