[rudra]

i would like to know if any of you guys know of any command line tool that can convert colour bitmap images to vector images. I'm talking about PNG image to SVG image format.
a friend asked me to find out. so far i have tried sotrace. but that is only good for gray-scale/black and white pictures. one can convert jpg to uncompressed png pretty easy using convert from imagemagick. but that colour png input yields a b/w output from sotrace.

oh. i also tried using sotrace and imagemagick under termux in Android. it works.

[deanhills]

Does this one work - it's an online tool:

https://convertio.co/png-svg/

I used it previously - can't remember what it was needed for - but then remembered I used this tool.

[rudra]

thanks Dean! i tried a few online tools. but all i got from them were transparent empty files mostly. or badly scaled ones. just horrible. didn't see this one though. thanks. i will check.

do you use inkscape ? i read that it has an awesome plugin to do the same which is now available as a standalone utility too. but i gotta go sleep now.

thanks for taking the time.

[fChk]

i would like to know if any of you guys know of any command line tool that can convert colour bitmap images to vector images. I'm talking about PNG image to SVG image format.
a friend asked me to find out. so far i have tried sotrace. but that is only good for gray-scale/black and white pictures. one can convert jpg to uncompressed png pretty easy using convert from imagemagick. but that colour png input yields a b/w output from sotrace.

oh. i also tried using sotrace and imagemagick under termux in Android. it works.

I used an svg2png tool when I was developing my WebMapping engine (spritezero-cli) but a png2svg ?!.. Rather unusual!.. You start from a nice 25KB png to end up with 2.5MB SVG file (assuming the conversion is Ok-ish...)

Anyway, may be this one https://github.com/xyproto/png2svg, but you need to have Google's golang installed for it to run.

[rudra]

I used an svg2png tool when I was developing my WebMapping engine (spritezero-cli) but a png2svg ?!.. Rather unusual!.. You start from a nice 25KB png to end up with 2.5MB SVG file (assuming the conversion is Ok-ish...)

Anyway, may be this one https://github.com/xyproto/png2svg, but you need to have Google's golang installed for it to run.

That person was looking for a way to convert a nice image of a logo into an usable SVG file. I expected that once he understood that even if he successfully got a good SVG, it was pointless, cause they were just embedded bitmap data instead of vector graphics , he would stop. But apparently everyone is not happy with just thinking in abstract. Also I have seen that those type of people are not necessarily dumber than thinkers. They get awesome results as often and kinda complete the whole along with thinkers. Thats why i decided to help him find what he said he was looking for.

I read that some utilities require sotrace installed or it will replace each bitmap pixel with a circle of 0 radius. haha. so would end up into a huge file size.
it is like using -p in this utility you linked to. but it draws rectangles.
but i used sotrace and even if it is just black and white, the size increase is not that dramatic.

Thanks for the utility. I will check it.

[LightDestory]

You can't easily convert a PNG image to a SVG image because you want to transform a RASTER IMAGE into a VECTORIAL IMAGE.

There is no a "official" way to do that because raster images are just a MATRIX OF PIXEL, meanwhile vectorial image is a geometrical formation.

You can't translate our reality into geometrical without losing quality.

[rudra]

...
You can't translate our reality into geometrical without losing quality.

i liked reading until i reached that part. who told you that reality was vector based? you are right in that SVG defines families of points using functions and that really helps with its small size and zoom ability / adaptability. But not all collection of points can be generated using suitable concise generating functions yet. so bitmap style info of every pixel representation is supported in SVG too. using single point zero area curves.

NOTE: in higher math, the idea of function is much broader. It includes defining with specifying all the points individually too. But i guess everyone understands what I'm trying to convey by "generating function".

So that last line is really meaningless. I'm sorry.

all we know so far are just models of reality. or an image of reality to the best of our ability. We don't know really.

that way lies the hell hole of knowability and epistemology.