As an example, I have chosen a sketch of a sawfish cartoon, originally drawn on lined notebook paper then scanned. To see how it works, install and launch Frontline and pick a bitmap or PNG file to work with.

You can run Frontline as a standalone application or call it from within another image editor like the GIMP. For Linux users, a pair of programs called Autotrace and Frontline are just what the doctor ordered, finding the edges and curves in the raster image, tracing the result, and generating a vector image that you can work with in a program like Inkscape or Sodipodi.Īutotrace is a command-line program written by Martin Weber Frontline is its GTK front-end by Masatake Yamato. When you need to create a vector-based image out of a raster-based image, you have two choices: trace it out yourself (via mouse or graphics tablet), or use a specialized program to automatically trace and convert it for you. Graphic designers prefer to work with vector-drawing applications because they can manipulate the shapes of the designs themselves, rather than the pixels that form the design in a raster image.

Tracing in inkscape tutorial