On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 10:37 +0100, jiho wrote:
I just found out about this app developed at Stanford: http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/ which offers high quality bitmap vectorization/tracing
Yes, this is very cool.
Since it is developed in a university lab I wonder how they would license it. Maybe getting them a bit exited about Inkscape would incline them toward putting their code under a license liberal enough for Inkscape to use it. I did not contact them but I think it would be a good thing if someone more officially involved in Inkscape contacted them and discussed a possible collaboration, or at least pointed them to the traces Inkscape/Potrace can produce. I would love to see a fifth column on their comparison page with Inkscape kicking Adobe and Corel's a.... ;)
If they'd be willing to license it in an open source way, we can start to look at including it. University labs are unfortunately hit-and-miss on stuff like that. But, from the Inkscape perspective we want the best free solution for our users. If a new player entered the scene we'd definitely be interested.
I'll write them an e-mail, but I'm not too optimistic.
I personally think that potrace is better than Corel/Adobe today in most cases. But, the one from Standford looks even better.
--Ted