[OS X TeX] i-installer and autotrace

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Mon Jul 4 16:23:32 CEST 2005


Le 4 juil. 05 à 16:03, Stephen Moye a écrit :

>> On Jul 4, 2005, at 15:31, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>>
>>> That said, I prefer personally potrace to autotrace.
>
> I too prefer potrace, but autotrace works on a wider variety of  
> file types such as tiff.

Earlier this year I traced a JPEG logo to convert it to EPS. After  
much failed attempts, I used the following route:

- Use either GraphicConverter (came free on my Mac), or convert from  
ImageMagick, to convert the JPEG to black-and-white BMP. I'm not sure  
which of the two I used eventually. Possibly GraphicConverter, as it  
provides a GUI for setting the value of the threshold used when  
converting to B&W -- and seeing live the influence of this value. The  
choice of the threshold has a crucial effect on the quality of the  
final EPS file.

- Applied both potrace and autotrace to the BMP file independently.  
Found out the output of potrace is cleaner (less tracing artifacts).

I also tried letting potrace and/or autotrace use their own  
algorithms for converting the original color file to black-and-white  
before tracing it: the output was much worse than with the manual  
conversion.

That said, it was all before hearing Illustrator CS2 includes a  
tracing algorithm. Now I probably wouldn't go that route.

Bruno Voisin--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>





More information about the macostex-archives mailing list