Mike's Sketchpad Newsroom

I have received many emails re: raster to vector conversion. I have always used Adobe Streamline in the past, but Adobe has discontinued Streamline and replaced it with the new tracing tool in Illustrator starting with version CS2 and going forward. Fortunately, there is a free Open Source application called AutoTrace that is available (ref: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ “AutoTrace – converts bitmap to vector graphics”). I have been following the development of AutoTrace for a couple of years, now. It has been available for the Windows platform for awhile, now, but it was difficult for the average user to configure all the open source parts of the program to get it to work.

Now there is an online tool that anyone with an Internet connection can access at the RO I T Systems website: http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl. Simply upload your raster image and the program will convert your raster image into a vector file in SVG format. You can save the SVG file to your drive, then open it in Illustrator (CS or later version) and be able to make edits or save it as Illustrator AI or EPS format.

AutoTrace is also available for the Macintosh in the program Delineate. A Mac OS X version of Delineate 0.5 has been bundled together with potrace and AutoTrace. It is available as a single Mac dmg file. It is available here: http://delineate.sourceforge.net/download.html. This is the link to the Delineate main page: http://delineate.sourceforge.net/.