I am kind of new to this so bare with me. I've been trying to get autotrace to work with inkscape, but i dont know how I'm suppose to go about it and the wiki hasnt been very helpful to me. I've looked at trying to make the Frontline and Delineate GUI's work but so far its not working for me (most of the documentation is very old with no updates and im running a different OS ). Ive been using the trace bitmap option for awhile now and now looking for a centerline tracer. Does anyone know how i am supposed to get this done? Are there any easier methods to get a good trace without doubling the amount of nodes? From the autotrace/frontline wiki it seems some compiling needs to be done but its very vague & unhelpful and im not experienced with source/binary files.

Hi DrVec
Welcome to the forums!

I'm not familiar with "Frontline and Delineate GUI's". But here's a trace engine that offers a centerline trace option: http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl I don't know if it doubles the nodes, but I've used it (for a non-centerline trace) and it seems to be a good quality tracer!

Thanks brynn, I've checked the site out and but it isn't doing the job i want it to. While i can see the potential to use it for single files, I have several images that will need constant tweaking of parameters, so its not going to be a viable option for me . The reason is that the scripts im working with are very picky with what i can feed into it and even after the images have been vectorized i will still need to do a lot of work to clean them up in inkscape, if they make it to that point.

Does anyone have any experience with compiling Autotrace/Frontline with inkscape from the source for windows? This seems like the only option left for me to go besides installing another os just for a particular GUI. If anyone knows how to do a clean raster to svg with centerlining that would be just what i need

Hmm... I have an already written article in the pipeline exactly on vectorization/tracing. It just needs translating. Gimme a day or two. Until then you can refer to http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Trace.html. No free tool I know of does centerline tracing. We've been hearing this request for a while now. But we need it in potrace first so we could use it.

prokoudine wrote:No free tool I know of does centerline tracing.

Autotrace does support centerline tracing, even in the web interface.
Also discussed in an earlier topic here in the forum, and filed as feature request to embed autotrace in inkscape.

~suv wrote:Autotrace does support centerline tracing, even in the web interface.

OMG, silly me. What else have I missed?

prokoudine wrote:No free tool I know of does centerline tracing. We've been hearing this request for a while now. But we need it in potrace first so we could use it.

I see - in bug #211761 “Centerline tracing”, MenTaLguY wrote on 2008-04-05: «One issue I'm slightly concerned about is that (at the time I was working on autotrace, almost ten years ago), there were patent issues surrounding centerline tracing. (Perhaps the patents have expired in the meantime?)».

Do you happen to know if these patent issues (apparently for centerline tracing in general?) still exist (must be about 12 years later now).