Hi guys,

I'm looking for a way to imitate the behaviour of a theoretical "Fill to Path" functionality. Think about the existing "Stroke to Path" functionality, which basically converts the stroke of something to a path -- I would like to do pretty much the opposite, convert the fill to a path.

Why? Well, I got inspired by this topic. Say that you added some text using , or even just a single letter. It is easy to convert this single letter to a path, and then convert the stroke of this path to another path (using "Stroke to Path"). But what I would like is to convert the actual fill of this path to another path -- the intention is to create "engraving" letters, i.e. letters existing of a single path (no outline).

Take for instance the letter M, it shouldn't be that hard to transform/convert this "outline" letter to an "engraving" letter, right? There must be several ways to accomplish this, for instance by using the Boolean operators (Difference, Exclusion)...? Thanks!

[Edit] I know that both druban and ~suv provided some directions/solutions in that topic, but I wonder whether the "engraving" letter could be generated from the "outline" letter.

Hi Ailurus,
At first I was going to say that's pretty much what the Paint Bucket tool does, creates a fill that's a path. But that's a closed and filled path. You're looking to make usually an open path, or perhaps subpaths (depending on how a letter is constructed) and stroked, not filled. Well, you have a far better grasp of the technical side of Inkscape than I do, so perhaps this is too simple for what you have in mind. But I wonder if using a centerline trace would solve the problem?

Yep exactly, open paths and sometimes additional subpaths (e.g. for the letter T). I've actually never used the trace options, are you talking about the Path → Trace Bitmap... option? I don't see anything that says "centerline" or something similar

No Trace Bitmap does not have a centerline trace option. But this trace engine does: http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl I think there may be other vector tracers around which will do a centerline trace, but I don't know where/what/who they are. Oh....there's a popular vector editor that's been mentioned in the forum often, if I could only remember the name....maybe vector magic? Hhmmm....not sure if that's it, but maybe.

Oh, and someone made a trace engine, which I think is based on Potrace (like Trace Bitmap) but I don't know if it, or if Potrace has a centerline option. Anyway, they have it posted somewhere around the forum. The title is something like "how to reproduce Trace Bitmap -- solved". I apologize that I don't remember the member's name.