bitmap tracer confusion for simple scan of words drawn by hand

[gwpriester]

Here are some links to old XaraXone tutorials on how to get the best results with Xara's Bitmap Tracer:

http://archive.xaraxone.com/guest/guest49/

http://archive.xaraxone.com/guest/guest62/

http://archive.xaraxone.com/guest/guest53/

[handrawn]

those bring back memories

[mintintegral18]

Thanks and thanks for the screen shot of settings and links to guides. I have yet to follow those. I've have tried 11 combinations and I'm not sure which parameter is creating these hair whisps lines. As a side issue, in case Xara is able to fix it, each time I zoom in to a layer and click the HIDE icon to toggle and compare each layer, to compare Layer1 bitmap tracer settings to layer2 bitmap tracer settings, the window focus area changes and I have to scroll the window to the letter I was using to test what changes occurred. Just seems like a bug or somehow hacked my zoom settings get changed. Ever seen this? If find the parameter combination to remove these high whisps, I think I'll work with that. I've tried toggling accuracy to high and low, keeping all other parameters the same, but does not change it.

[handrawn]

I don't think your scans are 'clean' enough, the tracer is picking up too much spurious detail ['noise']... but unless you post an example it is guesswork

not sure what is happening with the zoom either because xara can alter the zoom focus in various ways; if you set mouse middle wheel to zoom, in options, and put your pointer over the area you want to see and then zoom in it should stay focused - maybe hide what you don't want to see before you zoom ?

[mintintegral18]

Yes, Thank you. I've examined my original scan 600 dpi, but pencil marks for some reason don't close fully some letters (to make MS Paint fill bucket work for example). The smoothing parameter, I have yet to test, I always kept that the same value when tweking others, but I suspect it could be related to the whisps. I also thought Bitmap tracer could fix it, or didn't know the scan had so many gaps, and then xfer to MS Paint for fill bucket. So, I'll look at the scanning settings. Thank you.

[mintintegral18]

I somehow stumbled upon this link, https://youtu.be/2exqqn1aXyE?si=_K2goh3U8TybWy5R

It's a youtube video from Xara, about BitMap Tracer. It shows a little more about the sliders! Excellent! and I rescanned images using "document" instead of "photo" quality, which helped clean the scans.
And for future reference, I found using Xara's Create Bitmap copy and toggling the setting the "2 colors" reduced a bunch of noise to black and white, and then when using another program, filling objects with color has become simple with Microsoft Paint.

[handrawn]

good to see you make progress