[Offtopic] Club flags: convert PNG to SVG

Regarding the PNG thumbnails of club flags that Andy showed us,
and the recommendation to use a format that works well at
any size:

Free & open tools like Inkscape [1] (command "Path / Trace Bitmap")
and Gimp [2] can detect paths on bitmap images and generate
a(n approximate) vectorial version.

Also, the command potrace [3] can do that from the command line
(useful to process a large number of files in batches); either:

   $ convert FILE.png FILE.pbm && potrace -s -o FILE.svg FILE.pbm

or:

   $ cat FILE.png | pngtopnm | potrace -s -o FILE.svg

Caveat: potrace can't handle colours [4]. There are recipes to deal
with that (eg, extract colours first, run potrace once per colour,
compose all layers into a single image).


[1] https://inkscape.org/en/
[2] https://www.gimp.org/
[3] http://potrace.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://potrace.sourceforge.net/faq.html


-- 
Antonio Olmo Titos — web developer, W3C
antonio@w3.org · https://w3.org/People/Antonio

Received on Wednesday, 17 May 2017 12:15:07 UTC