[Note brought to inkscape-devel from Inkscape-user]

On 2007-May-04 , at 10:05 , Michael Grosberg wrote:

John R. Culleton <john@...125...> writes:

...

Is there a function in Inkscape equivalent to the "live trace" in the latest version of Illustrator?

No, there isn't.

The is a tracing function in Inkscape in Path > Trace bitmap. The differences are that in Inkscape: - you get a small bitmap preview of the trace result before doing the actual trace. From my point of view this allows to work on small machines while redoing the complete tracing each time you change a parameter (i.e as in Illustrator) is probably very resource hungry. The bitmap preview is not autoupdated so that's not exactly "Live" but the update is just a click of a button away. - the preview is in the Tracing window rather than on canvas. - there are not tracing presets as in Illustrator but I guess these should not be too hard to make - the color mapping (map the trace colors to a palette) does not exist (and the functionality is pretty cool actually see http:// www.creativecow.net/articles/mcmahon_frank/livetrace/livetrace.htm ) So there are less bells and whistles but the main functionality is there.

From a developer point of view: - what about auto-updating the preview when the parameters are changed? IMHO that would slow down things too much but maybe an auto- update checkbox would be nice for people on bigger machines than mine. - how hard would it be to put the low resolution bitmap preview of the trace on canvas rather than in the trace dialog? This would be a nice feature and would probably ease things very much when it comes to docking the trace dialog. - the color mapping feature is really nice and probably handy in some situations (e.g. I am doing a flyer with a defined color palette and I want to integrate a traced bitmap). I don't see any color mapping options in potrace so I guess this would require some substantial changes to potrace. Alternatively an extension which would map all colors in selected objects to their closer match in the selected swatches set would probably be very nice in many situations and not just on a traced object (I am thinking of cliparts imported from OCAL for example).

Cheers,

JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/