Sally.

I think I owe you two appologies.

I now realise why you are tracing manually. I appear to have confused you with the image I posted, which was a jpeg for attachment purposes only. The image was originally a vector. The path was created in Draw (no bitmaps involved). When I asked how to fill the spaces in an open path, I should have stated it was a vector path. Not sure whether a bitmap outline is classed as a path, or not? I think you basically knew the solution to this one. I guess it was so easy, you assumed it had to be harder. All I can say is, if you managed to go from a bitmap to a vector in 28 seconds, I'm mighty impressed. Of course timing isn’t important. I mentioned it more as a clue to the simplicity of the solution.

I asked this one because when I first started using Draw (V8), I remember quite a few new users struggling to understand why they couldn't just fill any apparently closed space with colour, just as you would with pencil and paper. Replies explained why it couldn’t be done, but never offered a solution. Even recently on the Unleash site I noticed a poster had failed to get a reply to the same question. Although it’s fair to say the Unleash forums are pretty much dead these days.

On to your challenge. To be honest, I had assumed you were thinking aloud regards my original post (due too it being placed between the two paragraphs). Sorry Will certainly give it a go tonight. Have an idea, or two already.

Grafixman

Although I now appreciate you were probably approaching this from a similar direction to Sally, I’m still baffled by where all your nodes are coming from. Maybe you’re working with Trace? If you start with a bitmap, converting to a vector in Trace gives acceptable results at the default setting. You do get a few border objects that need to be deleted because Trace doesn’t allow transparency. The outline/path is also just an object, but the vector shapes that make up the enclosed spaces don't have that many more nodes than the Outline to Object/Break Apart method creates when working entirely with vectors in Draw. Really can't understand why you get the strange black object in your example???

As for Draw, I’m the first to point out its faults. I mainly get frustrated with things that are fixed, but were never broken. It’s true, Draw is certainly not as efficient as Xara, but Draw is twice the program that Xara is. It also suffers from bad default settings. Bitmaps default to 300dpi, not 72dpi. This can seriously affect performance if working with Drop shadows etc. Also, in previous versions the Undo level was set to 99, which was crazy even for a vector app. Silly things like having to set the zoom ratio to Zoom Relative to 1:1 before pixels are matched to screen resolution at 100% zoom. This should be the default. Even the default Workspace is enough to put most people off. I have my own stripped down Workspace, and in use I still find it more efficient than Illustrator, due to the ease of use of its basic tools. The Shape tools, node editing and applying colour are all a breeze in Draw. Xara is very similar, and faster, but it seems a little dated to me. It hasn’t really been updated for quite a few years now.

I guess if you’re working commercially you can justify having a whole bunch of apps installed and using whatever does a particular job most efficiently. Since Sally informed me of Oberon’s AI Clipboard Macro, Draw does everything I need from a vector app, so for now I’ll put up with the few issues I have and continue to use it until Corel totally mess it up, or Illustrator is made more user friendly.

Sark