potrace, rad image vectorizer

March 31st, 2004  |  Tags:  |  3 Comments

A colleague pointed me to potrace as a potential way to tame some ridiculous scatter plots that I’d made. (They had ca. 30,000+ points — a paper with five of them took 45 minutes to print!) However, I soon found other applications.

The other day, I’d taken a lot of notes on my office whiteboard. I didn’t feel like copying them down, so I took a picture of the board with my digital camera, and used potrace to generate an efficient, readable PDF, suitable for framing (or, at least, printing). After all, what is technology for if not to facilitate laziness?

I decided to get “artistic” next — you know, scare-quotes artistic means “I did something cute and cheap with some image processing hack.” I applied potrace to the infamous waterskiing photo, with mildly pleasant results:

Before:

After:

potrace is available on Linux, Mac, and Windows (for those of you who lead a benighted computing existence). I bet you can come up with even better uses for it. In any case, I’m so impressed that I’m considering re-doing the friendly willbenton.com logo with potrace (a small version of that logo is the “favicon” on this site; the original was done by hand).

I’m currently listening to We Know Something You Don’t Know from the album “Deep Concentration, Vol. 4: Wreckin’ the Floor” by DJ Format, Chali 2na & Akil

Responses

Feed Trackback Address
  1. Jim says:

    February 15th, 2006 at 05:38:51 PM (#)

    Hi,
    I just found potrace and think ts exactly what I need however I am having difficulty geting it to work. The creaotr is amybe too busy, he hasn’t returned my email. Wondering if you can help out? What’s the command you use at the C:/ prompt to change a bmp file to an eps file? Does it create the file and place it in the same folder? Or does the program pop open the MSPaint or some other graphic utility program for saving the new file? Thanks in advance. Jim

  2. Will Benton says:

    February 15th, 2006 at 05:44:51 PM (#)

    Jim,

    I’ll answer your question if you’ll tell me what you’re doing with potrace. (I’m particularly interested if you’re using it for a woodworking application.)

    I don’t use Windows, but on a Mac or Linux, you can type “potrace file.bmp” — that will create a file called file.eps in the same folder. On Windows, you’ll want to make sure that potrace.exe is in your PATH. Note that potrace works best for monochrome images, since the extracted eps file will be monochromatic.

  3. Jim says:

    February 17th, 2006 at 06:50:23 AM (#)

    Hi Will,

    I sent you an email. Thanks.

    Jim

Leave a Response