I'm trying to trace bitmap on a signature and nothing is happening at all! I imported a pdf of the signature, clicked resize document to selection under document properties, then went to work trying to trace bitmap. I selected (I think) the signature, it just selects a rectangle shape for now of course, at the bottom of the screen it displays "Group 1 of object in layer xyz" (I think this is part of the problem, shouldn't it indicate something else if its actually selected). I went for single scan, brightness cutoff, thresholds at 880 and 970, colors 2. When I click ok literally nothing happens. At the bottom of the screen instead of "group 1 etc." it just says "select an image to trace". THE IMAGE IS ALREADY SELECTED. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong and I'm so frustrated. I've tried changing everything, single scan, multiple scan, reimporting the pdf, not resizing it. I don't know what to do but I need to figure it out asap, please help!

Thanks,
L

It might need to be un-grouped.

The status bar should indicate an image is selected:




Regards,
TD

Hi.

Pdf-s can have alot of things going on, like bitmaps can be turned to be fill patterns used on a clipped group of a rectangle...
So try to clean that up first-ungroup everything until no groups left out, then delete everything except the part you want to be traced.
If the indicator bar says that's an embedded image the size of..., then you can autotrace it with no problem.

You can make it all easier if you import the scanned image as raster image -preferably png, and use that instead of a pdf.

One way that I've dealt with tracing images in PDF files is to open the file in a PDF viewer, full-screen it, zoom in to make the signature as big as you can, then take a screenshot. You'll probably have to crop the screenshot in a bitmap editor to remove window decorations. Import, or copy and paste, that bitmap image into Inkscape, and trace.

It's a couple of extra steps, but you know you've got a bitmap that's ready for tracing, rather than having to deal with the various possibilities in a PDF file.

Thanks everyone! While the image showed up as being selected (like the picture you included), I ended up having to use the node tool to actually get it to select. I have no idea why. Once I did that though it all went like it was supposed to.. thanks for all the ideas and suggestions!