Paper to XML

A recent exercise I undertook was to transform a paper drawing into an SVG vector graphic. First time I've tried it and it seems to have worked, with a few niggles. The input was a plan of a building, to which I wanted to add annotations. The scale needed implied that this just wasn't on for paper. SVG has this feature, in spades. I can (almost) annotate at the micron level as well as the global. Fractal reality?

Getting from paper to soft form was more of an issue. I tried a photocopy blow-up, A4 to A3, which provided some very rough lines. Scanning that produced odd sized images. Inkscape is my current SVG editor. Lacking scanner support on Linux, I scanned into PSP, cropped the piece I wanted and moved to Linux. Inkscape has a feature which tries to convert a bitmap graphic into vectors, though I failed singularly to make sense of this.

I found the easy way was to make the drawing the same size as the imported png file, then 'trace' round the shapes using my tablet and pen. Being A5, it's not really up to it, though inkscape has this nice feature of letting you move things about then 'continue' drawing from where you left off. Neat. I needed to have closed shapes to enable an easy 'fill' with colour, so I needed clean object boundaries. This lets me group them and use the title and text attributes of the group.

Summary? Partial success. I'm quite pleased with the output, though my levels of patience aren't really up to doing this with a large drawing.

I'd have liked inkscape to help me by 'smoothing out' my hand drawn curves. Couple of times I used Bezier curves, which was a partial success, but a simple path was used most of the time. I'm very well pleased with Inkscape in general as a tool. Never bombed, has the capability and produces neat output.