What is Reddit's opinion of potrace?

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There are programs that do this, you can search for automatic image vectorization. Plenty of web services.

The basic algorithmic approach is to trace the outline of the image (or of each solid colored block). Then you fit parametric (bezier) curves to your trace, and you have a vector outline that can be scaled as desired.

There are heuristics involved in the tracing process, but generally works very well as long as you have good inputs. On the other hand, if your input is super low resolution, the trace becomes more ambiguous and your output is less likely to be what you want. Similarly, it works well for large blocks of solid color, but if you try to feed in something with lots of noise, gradients or textures, most approaches will do poorly.

Here's a paper from 2003 that covers some of the techniques used for the tracing portion: http://potrace.sourceforge.net/potrace.pdf

• Trace to polygons. Assuming you have clearly defined shapes, this will be not too hard, there are libraries for that, and there's this algorithm from 2003 http://potrace.sourceforge.net/potrace.pdf - this is for better understanding, but consider using some library.
• Detect skeleton lines between pairs of edges, use them or just shrink edges towards skeleton http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1109536/an-algorithm-for-inflating-deflating-offsetting-buffering-polygons

I don't know of any neural network solutions (I'm sure it's only a matter of time!) but you can use an algorithmic tracer like potrace and it should work fine. If there are quality issues, rendering at a higher resolution (or post-processing with SRCNN/waifu2x) and then running the tracing software should improve things.

I did a quick test on the post's header image using the default GIMP path trace algorithm (different from potrace, but same idea):

Default parameters

Default parameters with w2x upscaling first

Upscaling first gives sharper results in a lot of cases, but you could probably do fine using a lower resolution and decreasing smoothing parameters in potrace. Definitely something that could be automated easily!

You could also try to get those symbols from the PC version (hopefully from the assets or maybe from screenshots) and then use [http://potrace.sourceforge.net/] potrace to transform them into vector graphics that you can then scale up. Note that there may be some copyright issues with that (not sure, IANAL).

http://potrace.sourceforge.net might be useful. Runs on everything, command line, and GPL. No idea if it could be integrated into your workflow. I had to break down each frame to a BMP and then put everything back together in Premiere.

Das einzige, was ich gemacht habe, ist „Scan Tailor“ darauf loszulassen. Wenn man jetzt noch bspw. „Potrace“ darauf wirft, dann kann man es auch quasi noch so stark vergrößern, wie man will. Solche Strichzeichnungen bieten sich dafür ja an.

EDIT: Es heißt „Scan Ta*i*lor“… Das sah heute Nacht schon komisch aus.

They seem... like awkwardly binarized with some software. It resembles output of Potrace or such, that all fine details are gone. I'm afraid what you see is only boldest strokes of those characters and it's quite hard to reconstruct the original writing.

I have a background in software engineering, so I initially spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to extract the vector data I wanted from Open Street Map to do this The Right Way... But in the end I realized it was much easier to simply take a very high resolution "screenshot" (I wrote a quick script to do this) and then trace the bitmap to get the vector file I wanted :)

If this is pure black and white line art, I got good results several years ago from poor images by vectorizing them then import the svg to Gimp. You can look at this page for examples and software download. An online tool is available here, but I did not try it. There is also a GUI tool named delineate. Of course, the image you trace must have the best possible contrast.

BTW, aliasing could have been caused by using two-color indexed images: rather improve the contrast of an RGB image than convert it to 2-color B&W.

Technically, yes but you’ll have to do a bit of testing - http://potrace.sourceforge.net

If you do this manually, Adobe Illustrator vector auto tracing does a good job at this as well. I use it often to rebuild raster logos into svgs.

When you say figure out the lines, you mean the x + y coordinates of the lines? Or something else? There are programs to convert jpeg to svg around: http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ but I imagine this is no help at all...I will look harder.

I understand. And agree to some extent. But the reality is that there are still lots of times where you want a simple rasterized image.

Plus... there is Potrace for when you need to turn iron into gold! :-) [http://potrace.sourceforge.net/]

As others have said, scanning a line drawing can work well. Typically, the complaint with that is that the scan is a raster image and people want a vector representation so they can rescale it without pixel artifacts. If that's an issue for you, I've had good success with potrace (see examples), which is available under the GPL and free to use.

No easy way to do it in Gimp. Try Inkscape and its "Trace bitmap" function (or the potrace utility that it uses under the hood), or online sites such as VectorMagic.