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Comment by IsaacSchlueter | Hacker News Reader

According to the site you linked:

    Vector Magic: A commercial tracing tool that
    is available through a web interface, for a
    fee. Unlike Potrace, Vector Magic works for
    color images.

So, I guess the benefits are:

    * It works in color
    * You get to pay for it, so you know it's Serious Business.

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It would be easy enough to use ImageMagick to quantize the image to a limited color palette, create individual images for each color, trace them using POTrace, and then combine them back together. That's not to say that there wouldn't be an infinite amount of tweaking, but I've basically implemented this before.

Adobe Illustrator does this too...but not as well.

Inkscape does just that. It allows you to run multiple scans with potrace, which gives you a separate path for each colour. Couldn't be more simple.

Just for fun, I tried it with the examples from the comparison on the website, but even with a lot of tweaking I didn't manage to get an image as sharp as they claim to get. I don't think Vector Magic uses potrace ;)

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