vextractor?

[deth502 39]

anyone tried it? just got a copy but i havent tried it or even installed it yet. im wondering if its worth it.

[JoeBlow 5]

I tried it and found I'd wasted my money

Joe

[deth502 39]

good part is no money wasted for me, just worried about wasting my hd space, and if it comes down to it, that can be reclaimed.

so not worth even trying? by the description, it seemed like it was more for .dwg files for cad.

[JoeBlow 5]

Look give it a try and see how you go, I was trying too convert Raster to Vector with it and found it wasn't as good as Inkscape, even Coreltrace was better. It was chunky and awful, very poor results.

Joe

[deth502 39]

thats what i was looking to do with it, and not so much the cad stuff.

i currently use inkscape, and im just in the process of looking for something that will trace better. i dont necessarily need easier, i dont mind having to "learn" a program, but i dont want to have to spend an hour cleaning up an image it took me 3 seconds to trace like in inkscape.

any suggestions on something better?

ive heard...was it "vector magic" ?? or something like that mentioned here before.

[boosted 2]

Vector magic is pretty good, still have to clean up a little. I haven't got the hang of inkscape yet, I just use vector magic and sign blazer to clean it up, then import into flexistarter.

[mark-s 1,126]

As with any auto trace program there will be clean up,no matter what you use.

Some are better than others.

I find that FelixSign Pro works best for me.

Alot of the time I redraw in PhotoShop first or touch up weak parts of the drawing.

Garbage in garbage out.

mark-s

[JoeBlow 5]

You'll find that even if you use both Vector Magic and Inkscape on the exact same graphic they will have different results. Sometimes Vector Magic is better than Inkscape, sometimes it's the other way round, it depends on what your graphic is and what you're trying to archive. Inkscape will often smooth lines more than Vector Magic but if you're wanting a more exact trace as in text for example it's Vector Magic.

Joe

[deth502 39]

i get the "garbage in, garbage out" comment. thats pretty much what i was talking about. some times you just cant get a good image, and smoothing out a pixelated line or curve can take quite a while. it would be nice if there wa s a program that could detect a pixelated line for what it is and smooth it out accordingly, but it looks like im still gonna be stuck doing it myself.

[Primal Decals 621]

I just started using vector magic a little and i think its alot easier to use than inscape in my own opinion... i got it thru a friend for free.

[Wildgoose 4,200]

Sometimes you are just better off hand tracing things. It's evidently becoming a lost art or something. I rarely am satisfied with a trace and typically just take a few minutes an draw it out like I want right over the top of the pic. Heath food in health food out (or in my case cheese burgers) With practice you can draw a nice clean image about as fast as you can traced and clean one and the results are far more easily controlled. Tracing tends to use funky combinations of nodes which end up being a PIA to smooth out. Can't really blame the trace function, it's just doing it's best to interpret what you tried to tell it but there are so many points it's impossible for it to guess correctly. 

[slice&dice 2,450]

Many here have said that SureCutsALot (CraftEdge) has a very nice vector engine.

[jaybyrd 3,770]

On most things I can get an acceptable trace from scalp with some tweaking of the settings. There will always be times when drawing is just plain better and no matter what text should be recreated.