Somedays, its nice just to stumble across a little program or utility that makes you day just that little bit easier. Potrace by Peter Selinger is one of those great little programs. Potrace traces a bitmap and then transforms the bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. At the moment Potrace can output the file as an EPS, PostScript, SVG (scalable vector graphics), and PGM file. Very useful for when you want to do something with some crusty old gif file or something, and you can’t be assed tracing by hand in Illustrator or something. Here’s an example of a file that I converted:
- Drexciyan Gill Man (before)
- Drexciyan Gill Man (after)
And its nice to see that its available for Linux, Sun Solaris, Apple Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, AIX and Windows.
Nice.. I’m going to have to check this out and have a play. Wonder how it goes on text….
Very nice Gill man… i might make a stencil outta that!
You know, Macromedia Flash can vectorise bitmaps also…
Yeah, but that doesn’t really help me since I don’t have Flash, nor do I want it (there’s no Linux version anyhow). Using Flash just for that purpose seems like a bit of overkill for me. My main purpose is to use it for getting bitmaps online and perhaps using it on t-shirts or something…
what the hell
awesome is the program open source?
JJ
Dave, was wanting to check this out but it seems the pictures are no longer loading… any chance you can get them back up? Thanks.
Drexciyan Gill Man (after) – its a very god!
Very nice program thank you mate!
Nice tool there. Gonna try it later.
Glad that it also available for Linux machine.
Thanks for sharing this.
What an incredible piece of kit! I’m really impressed with this, I’m going to have a wee play with it tonight when I get home from the grind!
Thanks I’m giving this a try now.
Cool little program. Will give it a whirl. Thanks.
Great work
Thanks for sharing
I’m going to use it
Funny how an app that was made some time ago still is so useful. Kudos awesome job.
Vic
Nice to see this post. I’ve been using Potrace for 2 years now. Nice program that does the job.
I have also used now for over a year Potrace and man simple and basic but kills it when it comes to doign the job.
Wow mmm my comment did not go through kind of weird. Anyway great app and very usefull higly recommend Potrace
I used to have Potrace and found it just as useful. Unfortunately it was on my old PC and it crashed and I ever forgot about it. Time to pick it up again.
Thanks for pointing me to a great piece of software. Best of all, it’s open source. I work with graphics constantly, and I think this will help speed the little things up and save me some time. Portrace is great!
Indeed Potrace is a classic and still incredible useful.
Potrace is definitely a classic. I guess it’s human nature to use what has always worked in the past. I even remember using ARJ well into 2001. Cheers! – Matt
Nothing better than little tools like this one that saves you time and effort.
I used to use this program and it did a great job. Still does I suppose.