HACKER Q&A
📣 mg

Software to turn black and white image into plottable SVG?


Over the coming days, I can use a plotter and would like to plot some of the black and white images I created via AI:

https://twitter.com/illubots/status/1568997960486162432

Which software is the best to turn these into plottable SVG files?

There are two tricky aspects to it:

The pen of the plotter is rather thin. So one line in the image has to be made from multiple lines plotted.

The plotter can not lift the pen. It plots the whole image in one long line. So it would be nice if the software sorts the lines it creates to minimize the lines the plotter creates when going from one part of the image to the next.

  👤 brudgers Accepted Answer ✓
Coreldraw ships with a utility to convert bitmaps to vectors.

It has for at least 25 years.

And is currently available as physical non-subscription media.

Good luck.

https://www.coreldraw.com/en/product/coreldraw/?x-vehicle=pp...

👤 Someone
What’s your input format? Bitmap? Vector?

Also, are you sure the plotter cannot lift the pen? That’s rather weird for a plotter, sort-of turning it into an Etch A Sketch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etch_A_Sketch)

If you have a bitmap, I would hunt for a printer driver for a plotter, and try intercept its output.

Alternatively, look for software that uses turtle graphics to print bitmaps.

A cursory search didn’t find me much, though (large ink-jet printers nowadays are called plotter, and plotter services seem heavily advertised on Google), so both may not easily lead to results.

(About the only thing I found is https://observablehq.com/@ehouais/bitmap-image-to-plotter-sv...)

👤 9wzYQbTYsAIc
You might have some luck with OpenCV - it has a variety of edge detection features to turn an image into lines. Someone may have already pulled together a mechanism to turn that output into an SVG.

Making it plottable might be tricky without manual intervention or implementing your own plotting transformation.

3d printer slicing software transforms 3d models down to stacked layers of “plottable” lines, so you might have some luck looking at projects in that space, too.

👤 sandreas
Would Inkscape tracing work for you?

https://inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tracing-an...