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Scanning to vectors


CHE
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Adobe has a program called Streamline that traces things, supposed to be good with bw. Never used it, though. It's old, too.

 

Illustrator has the Autotrace function.

 

That's all I am aware of.

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I believe it depends on the type of information you want to vectorize. You could use a raster to vector software (i.e. streamline) for topographic information where there's a certain degree of error than could be acceptable, especially because curves have been already averaged. This should be a one-button solution.

 

For arch. plans, however, it could be better to trace the images in acad, otherwise there could be a lot of cleaning and optimizing vectors that will eventually take the same time as tracing.

 

/Diego

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I'll be scanning hard copies of drawings in which certain degree of error is acceptable. I'm trying to avoid to trace the images in ACAD. Streamline sounds good, I'll give it a try. Thank you guys.

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CHE there are plenty of raster to vector programs out there. Never tried any of them, but I sure do remember running into a few of them (dont remember names or links)

If I'm not mistaken Freehand can trace simple raster files and change them to vectors. from there it should be easy to go to DWG through Illustrator format.

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  • 1 month later...
I'll be scanning hard copies of drawings in which certain degree of error is acceptable. I'm trying to avoid to trace the images in ACAD. Streamline sounds good, I'll give it a try.
What sort of drawings? Do you have a lot of them to do?

 

As mentioned, Illustrator has tracing tools. But Streamline is a lot less expensive. V4 is the latest, and I've had it for years. I guess there was no improvement that Adobe felt it needed. They still sell it.

 

Streamline traces line drawings very well, although the result is polylines that are joined in somewhat random ways, so the result will not be a neat CAD file. It will not recognize text, either. It thinks text is just more line art. If your art is architectural drawings, the program can straighten all lines it thinks are 0-180 or 90-270 but of course that could introduce some slight inaccuracy. The output can be .eps or, better yet, .dxf

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