Moho Forum

I'm playing with potrace, which converts bitmaps to vectors, by default saving as EPS files (apparently EPS version 3.0) which are ASCII encoded in nice, even 71-character lines ... these won't import properly in Moho or Flash, though. In Flash I just see a little dot in the middle of the screen that doesn't get any bigger when I zoom in on it. In Moho the dialogue box closes and nothing new appears at all (no error message or anything).

Anything I'm supposed to know about or do?

Potrace looks really neat on the webpage, it's just that thus far I can't see my own results.

Can you post a sample file generated by potrace? Without seeing the file, there's nothing I can really say.

Here it is.

It does display in the preview window in Nautilus on my Linux machine (no, it's not supposed to look like anything recognizeable, it's just a test), and when I double click on it on a mac it converts it to a PDF. It won't import into Moho on either the Windows computer or the Mac.

(Yes, we have a three-OS household. On one hand it's great, because if something doesn't work on one OS I can just try it on another computer, but it also makes life more complicated sometimes.)

The problem seems to be that the file is in a compressed format. Does potrace offer an option for uncompressed, ASCII EPS export?

I just took a quick look at potrace (I haven't actually used it), and it seems to have a command-line option -c to export the result as clear text (no compression). Try using that option with potrace.

Okay, try looking at this one now; it does import into moho, but weirdly.

Image in Nautilus:



Imported into Moho (Windows computer):

Well, something is clearly wrong. I'll look into it, but it may take a while to figure it out.

No hurry; just something I'm playing with, coming up with some ideas and stuff for how to make use of it.

The second .eps file doesn''t show up at all after importing into Flash, for what it's worth. But I know it's valid, because it displays OK in Nautilus, as you can see above. So I'm thinking there must be more variations on the .eps file format.

Another option you might try is to use the Delineate front end for both potrace and Autotrace. It outputs to .SVG. Illustrator imports it fine (I'm sure there are others as well, just can't pull another off the top of my head) and you can export a proper .EPS or .AI from there.

--Brian

Not sure if you are interested but I had bookmarked some similar software a while back. I found two of the links in the clutter.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/heatons/so ... x-free.htm

this is a freeware version of their commercial product.

There is also another one on sourceforge

http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html

I downloaded the sample output file and that seems to open fine in Moho.

As for autotrace, I didn't even bother to look into that because I saw a solitary comment on the internet that it wasn't quite as good as potrace.

Of course, that comment was by the author of potrace, so there could potentially be a teensy-weensy drop of bias in it.

Maybe just a little.

The first few paragraphs of the WinTopo page already have me laughing. "How much would you expect to pay for this?" I'm expecting some Ginsu knives to be thrown in.

Brian: Illustrator is by the same people that make Flash, right? That's why I'm kind of mystified that an EPS file won't be read by Flash. I don't have Illustrator, but I would think anything that Illustrator would take, Flash would too.

I don't know why I was thinking that. Adobe ... Macromedia ... they don't even sound alike. Okay, I do know why. Two words: lime vodka.

Seriously, though, even when I was sober ... ah, yes, I remember being sober ... I sort of had it in the back of my mind that Illustrator and Flash were kind of, uh, fruits that fell off the same tree.

God am I ever disoriented now.

Well, SVG (which is for Scalable Vector Graphics) is standard from the w3c, XML based, which has the potential to one day compete with flash. So, Adobe is happy to support it, and I doubt Macromedia would touch it with a ten foot pole. Adobe bundles a SVG viewer with the Acrobat reader now.

I definitely like potrace better myself. But it's only black and white. Autotrace does color, and it's okay. You can use either or both inside Delineate, and the main reason I mentioned it is because its a GUI front end, so you can see what you're getting right off without a lot of command line diddling. And now that LM opened us the access to external libraries in Lua, I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to write an SVG importer for Moho that uses the same parser Delineate uses for output. Maybe a vector exporter for Moho that Illutrator and RealDraw, at least would be perfectly happy with.

Oh, the possibilities. And watch out for that vodka, it'll sneak up 'n whack ya on the head.

--Brian