Ask HN: How to Systematically Turn Bitmaps into Beautiful Vector Graphics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Systematically Turn Bitmaps into Beautiful Vector Graphics?

2 pointsCoax3 comments

I've done plenty of work with web graphics, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc., but I have a problem that's trickier than anything I've dealt with before. Not only do I now know who to solve it, I don't know who to ask how to solve it.

Here's the issue...

I work for a theater nonprofit. I have a bunch of bitmap images of Broadway theater seating charts. I want to turn these seating charts into beautiful vector graphics to make interactive seating charts for our website. I could go image-by-image and try to recreate each one in Illustrator by hand, but that would take forever. I'd like to build a systematic way to take a bitmap seating chart and convert it into a vector graphic that captures the shapes of each seating section.

What's the best way to go about doing this? I realize the solution is complex and probably can't be answered on a HN post, but I'd just like to know what resources I can turn to. What folks would know about this sort of thing?

Have you tried using the Live Trace feature in Illustrator? That will do it's best to convert your graphics to vector. You can tweak the threshold to optimize the quality. Quality will depend a lot on the resolution of your graphics, and you'll still probably have to go in and clean up a lot of the shapes.

I haven't used it for your type of application, but I've used Potrace to convert some scanned hand-drawn graphics to SVG. The results were quite satisfactory.

http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

As I recall, I ended up using it via the front end Rasterbater 1.0 (linked on the above page; and as for the name, I know... but it's legit; have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiled_printing ) because it was the best/quickest compromise at the time. I also recall reading that people have used Potrace with Inkscape (a very good cross-platform SVG editor) in order to convert color images to SVG; I recall that workflow as something like using Inkscape (well, that doesn't quite make sense? I dont' remember, I guess) to produce color separations and then running Potrace against each separation.

Depending on how many you have, it seems like Live Trace in Illustrator is your best bet.

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