Hi everybody!

I use Inkscape to convert highres raster (png) images to vectorized art (->svg->pdf) for printing in DIN A0 size.
Up until now, Inkscape has cooperated relatively quietly, using maybe 1GB of RAM to store the many color layers created by the "Trace Bitmap"-function and any number of colors >= 100.
I find this number to be quite necessary to accomodate slight color gradients in the original picture.

Now, however, without changing my methods, I am running into trouble when my 2GB of RAM apparently don't suffice to store all the color layers anymore; I externally limited Inkscapes memory to 1GB and couldn't even store 100 layers. ("nice"-ing the process also did no good.)

As a last resort I tried using Inkscapes command line interface and the "--verb" functionality (which googling suggested as a solution), but apparently, this does not work for tracing, as verbs can't take parameters.

potrace, the tool which Inkscape uses for tracing, in its command line version unfortunately only delivers b/w results.

Is there any way to tell Inkscape to use less memory, or use the command line to achieve what I have in mind (i.e. starting from a page with a bitmap, resulting in the same page with x color layers of paths)?

I'm using Inkscape 0.47 r22583 (Apr 4 2010) on Ubuntu 10.04 x86_64.

Thanks in advance,
ThePadawan