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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I really love how much size SVG can save and you get a “cleaner” option when it comes to browser zoom levels and whatnot.

Has anyone had any success with SVG generation from a clear raster image?

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Inkscape has a filter that's been pretty reliable at generating vectors from raster inputs.

IIRC, that is based on the utility potrace.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace

potrace worked just fine for me when I needed to digitize some drawings that became a prominent part of a business's graphic design. Maybe a decade and a half ago.

Edit: I see now that Inkscape can do color by first decomposing into colors and then doing each of those separately.

There are plenty of online services that will do this for you (I don't recall which I've used to recommend), and they generally work but require quite a lot of post-processing, mostly removing potentially hundreds of extraneous points, unless it's all easy straight lines and simple curves.

Actually, I'll bet this would be a great place for AI to optimize.

I used a copy of (desktop) Vector Magic several years ago - it's almost certainly not worth the purchase price today (and better software may already exist), but it did very reliably get me a reasonably close SVG from an original image

Depends what you want; Inkscape does it well for some basic tasks involving images with few colours, I've often thought about how it could be achieved better for artistic pieces

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