I am trying to take a color image of a cartoon character and make a path trace of it for cutting on a CNC router. Just cutting the line with a "V"carve bit.
My issue is with the path trace. The image I have is like a coloring book image. Wide black lines with color filled in between them. Path trace gives me a very clean nice tracing of the image, but when I go to look at the outline it shows a double line. Basically the nice wide black line you have for the coloring book print turns into 2 lines. A line on each side of the black line.
Is there a way to either make path trace recognize this wide black line as the line and give me a single line in place of it. Or is there a way to merge these 2 , very close together, parallel lines into 1?
I have seen the node display option and breaking it up (path break apart). Then deleting the lines you dont want. That works for simple, low complexity , images but gets tiring on larger or more complex images.
I am looking for a simple process to get clean single lines from a wide line drawn image.
Any help is appreciated.

The attached file is a example. If you look at the trace that is what I want but if turn on Display mode - Outline, you will see the double lines it creates around all the single black lines.

Scott

Win 7 64 bit
Inkscape 0.91

Welcome aboard!

Inkscape's trace bitmap is not capable of centerline tracing.
You can try autotrace for that, which may/may not work.


Other option is manual editing in inkscape, as described here.


(There are more topics on this problem on the forum with the same answer.)

It's not really feasible to remove the double lines. Although depending on which pieces you need to cut, you might be able to still use some of those paths.

Since it's a relatively simple design, I would suggest tracing it "manually" with the Pen/Bezier tool. I wrote a series of tutorials about converting raster images to vector, and one of them is written just for this problem. http://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/inde ... article=45 If you can use some of the paths from the auto-trace, then there would be less to trace "by hand".

That tutorial only gives the very basics of node editing. The following one will give you more details about node editing, which you might need. You can just skip to the section on Node Editing, because otherwise this tutorial is fairly long...and plus, the general technique that's explained is exactly what you don't want to do. So just read the section on Node Editing, if you need it. http://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/inde ... article=46

(sorry for any repitition - Lazur posted while I was typing)

Rapid Resizer is another online option. Tutorial here uses a coloring book image http://cleversomeday.com/rrcenterline/

Oh yes. Inkscape's Trace Bitmap does not have a centerline trace option, while Rapid Resizer does. Here's another trace engine which I'm pretty sure has a centerline trace. http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl