bitmap tracer confusion for simple scan of words drawn by hand

Hello, I'm confused about a grayscale bitmap tracer. I've tried various options, but setting "Final color tolerance"=100 seems to be on the right path. As seen here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WiQ83Msa3w

however, with the images I'm posting here, I'm not sure what to tweke next? the Bitmap Tracer, seems to make multiple layers of objects. I've tried setting accuracy low and min area, but I get confused. Thanks. For black/white as the goal, and using pencil art that has been scanned to computer as the source, this is the settings I seem to get something workable. Bitmap Tracer settings: Grayscale with Remove noise=50, Min Area=39, Final color Tolerance=100, Accuracy=53 and Smoothing=78.

I want the black letter lines to be objects, not layers of black and white objects. As you can see the white area in the letter "a" has multiple handles. Maybe it's just a matter of sliding these values to a different combination, but I've already tried 11 and it's getting complex to keep track of which slider makes which affect. sources: https://helpandsupport.xara.com/xara...ng/tracer.html And this insert picture showing part of the letter E, that is almost what I am hoping Bitmap tracer can do.

you will get a group of objects [shapes] after the scan - to merge these you can ungroup the scan, and with all the objects still selected, press ctrl+J [join shapes] - but you must first remove the white background from the scan
so the steps would be:

ctrl+click on the white background of the scan group to select this only and delete
ctrl+U to ungroup
ctrl+J to join

depending on the mix of objects in the scan, the resulting single shape will be either black or white; if white simply recolour

to get good results it is very important to have a high resolution scan, I always scan at 600dpi

you may also need to darken the drawing first, if it is too light - and you will not get good results if the paper you have used is not scan 'friendly' and therefore does not scan with 'pure' white background

it is not possible for me to give any advice on the settings without a copy of the actual scan, but to be honest, rather than use xara for this I would suggest using inkscape, which is free; I only use xara tracer for the very straight forward scans and my starting point is:

Attachment 133190

if I don't get good results with these settings [having tweaked the image contrast/brightness] I go to inkscape; the SVG file from inkscape will import into xara but you may need to resize...

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/

those bring back memories ;)

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

good to see you make progress ;)