The little things

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 (before)
Drexciyan Gill Man (after)

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.