Had a look at the S-Sline demo and was admittedly impressed. For some, but not all types of image, the quality of enlargements is better than normal bicubic re-sampling, particularly for retaining sharpness on small details.

On first glance it would seem that Xara is closer maybe to this technology than you might think. Looking at the results using the S-Spline algorithm, some areas of a bitmap image (usually areas of high contrast) look very similar to the result of a bitmap trace in Xara.

I'm betting the S-Spline technology uses a clever method of identifying edges within a bitmap and applies a similar "vector trace" algorithm on the detected edge and combines that result into a bicubic or similar resample of the rest of the image - in essence it looks like S-Spline gives the best of both a regular resample and the equivalent of a bitmap trace.

Anyone agree?

Stu.