Tracing double Lines into Center Lines

GVogele · February 28, 2021, 8:48pm

Hi there, are you thinking about to do the feature in tracing for doing Double lines into Center Lines?

adammhaile · February 28, 2021, 10:10pm

We would like to, but it’s a really complicated problem. Inkscape has something called “autotrace” but development on it was abandoned years ago and it only sort of ever worked. I’m not personally aware of anything currently that does it well - though I’m happy to be proven wrong.
Point being that it’s a non-trivial problem that isn’t just a matter of we would have to solve it for our particular use-case but that basically no-one has solved it well yet.
It’s absolutely on our internal feature wish-list - just not a particular mountain we’ve decided to summit at this point.

LightBurn · February 28, 2021, 11:04pm

LightBurn’s current trace feature is a licensed library called PoTrace, which is the same thing used in InkScape for their non-centerline mode.

PoTrace doesn’t have a centerline mode, so AutoTrace is what InkScape uses for centerline mode, but it’s only available as open source, with no commercial licensing option I’m aware of, and as Adam says, it’s been abandoned for quite a long time.

Hank · March 1, 2021, 12:18am

The latest versions of Inkscape (1.0.2) has centerline trace and it works pretty well most of the time.

adammhaile · March 1, 2021, 1:35am

It’s still autotrace

GVogele · March 1, 2021, 5:22pm

Hi thank you will try inkscape

Hank · March 1, 2021, 5:42pm

I know. I’m only suggesting that if someone needs the feature it’s available in Inkscape.

GVogele · March 2, 2021, 7:04pm

Hi, had a try, no way how to make this a single Line trace

LightBurn · March 2, 2021, 7:45pm

If you filled that shape first, THEN did a centerline trace, that should work.

mogplus8 · March 28, 2021, 3:14am

I tried inkscape but I found the tracing of the images I wanted to trace was rather disappointing. Lightburn did a much better job of it. Tried a few other (free linux) raster to vector online converters, but none of them did a good enough job to be used in Lightburn imho.

So back to plan A for me. Manually tracing in my CAD package of choice (Onshape), saving as a dxf and importing into Lightburn.

:-\

tnek · April 11, 2021, 6:48pm

At times I have the same need… no answer for you GVogele however, several posts below yours talks about what you are trying to acomplish, if you haven’t, you might want to look at them. Their suggestions might get ‘us’ to the end result.

GVogele · April 11, 2021, 7:22pm

Hello, i trieded to fill the double lines before, and after traced that worked for me.

system · May 11, 2021, 7:22pm

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