Actually, I have 1.7 "tricks" (revelations, actually) I'd like to share here:

1. OMO, Xara Designer's auto-tracer is not as good as Vector Magix, either in precision, or unnecessary control points. Not Xara's fault; the experiment guys at Vector Magic have onhe, and only one product to improve upon and finesse.

1.7 . Inkscape (I can't imagine no one on this forum has heard of it), is just about program or util out there that can trace almost as well as Vecxtor Magic; we're talking about a $300+ difference for what I feel is a negligible difference.

What I'm really jazzed about, here, is that you don't need to save an svg file from Inkscape to get it into Xara. SVG is Inkscape's default and only file format for saving. Try copying from Inkscape, open a new document in Xara and press Ctrl+P for Paste. You'll get a confirmation box that asked you to paste as what?

Choose Enhanced Metafile, end of story. I've traditionall HATED MS's metafile format because it doesn't negotiate curves...at all. You wind up with a pasted an object with as many control points as our National Deficit because the curve is made up of eensy tiny straight line paths to simulate a curve.

Not so, evidently, with Win 10 and Enhanced Metafile. Here's a fair example of a target bitmap, and the pasted Inkscape guy.

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Cool? Or What?!

My Best,

Gary

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Yes, there are some superfluous control point but acceptably few IMO. And Inkscape has evaluated corners better than most utils in vector drawing programs.