Scanning line art

[John Childs]

I think you mean vectorising software because any old scanning programme will do and whatever came bundled with your scanner is usually fine.

Have a look at Adobe Streamline, but be aware that none of them are perfect and may require a lot of experimentation with the settings before you get the result you want.

[Chris Wool]

hi
take a closer look at what your scanning its proberbly rough any way also in corel trace you can control how close the vector follows the pixcels – the bit map should be black & white – if you were to create a line drawing in coral say a4 size convert to a bitmap at 300 dpi and trace it it will be next to perfect to cut so it cant be that bad

chris

[Rodney Gold]

Perfect Raster to vector conversion is the holy grail. We have tried with some real good and expensive stuff for Autocad and there is no single solution.
We use Coreltrace for laser engraving , cos jaggies make not much difference. We recreate for vector cutting or vector type (cnc) engraving , no matter what package you use , it’s still compromised if you want decent results.
You can use Trace and then select nodes to simplyfy the resultant trace , but it’s innacurate. Invariably doing it properly or asking the client for vector art is the way to go.

[Mike Fear]

Havent tried the Adobe one, but the best Raster to Vector I’ve found is the one on FlexiSign – you can control the resolution, accuracy etc… but it handles Jpegs and BMPs pretty well.

Note though that no converter I’ve used gives a perfectly usable scan straight off, they all need a bit of touching up in something like Draw to smooth them out ( most converters add too many nodes to make up for the blurry edges on compressed images ).

Mike
carnt b arsd thinking of something clever to put here

[Gordon Forbes]

The one in Signlab is pretty good lots of setting you can tweak how accurate amount of colours, line types etc etc (can tell it to merge colours after it has scanned posterised they call it) requires a bit less tweaking than some of the ones I have used.

Goop.