testriderchuck wrote: ↑Fri Apr 21, 2023 9:21 pm
"It's a simple line drawing" she said
"How hard can it be?" she said
Well, bitmaps as these usually originated from simple line-art.
To represent lines and especially slanted or curved lines and/or the stroke width the bitmap uses shades of gray.
Have a look at it at 500%:
- BananaSnip.png (39.34 KiB) Viewed 5638 times
The bitmap looks OK for us humans ... on a screen ... in the intended scale.
But it remains a (poor) representation.
For a computer it is merely a vast amount of pixels in all kinds of gray.
The way back to line-art is less straightforward and data compression doesn't help in that case.
To be exact you need the inverse mathematical approach of how the line-art is rendered as pixels.
And that will never be readily available.
There are many tools out there that do a throw at this, some already better than others.
Inkscape is one example but the bitmap tracing result depends on the used settings.
Center-line tracing will remove any stroke width.
- In QCAD/CAM that would result in a uniform carving with the used mill diameter.
Line-art with stroke width is yet another story.
- One can not represent that very well in DXF, polylines with widths are an option but that is still a center-line for QCAD/CAM.
Edge detection will try to draw an (hard) outline.
- QCAD/CAM doesn't support pocketing out of the box, aka filling the outlines.
So it is basically a question of the source file.
testriderchuck wrote: ↑Fri Apr 21, 2023 9:21 pm
I started with a png file, thought it'd work to convert to pdf. apparently I was wrong...
That will only embed the PNG image in the PDF.
SVG is a better option, the name says it all: Scalable Vector Graphics.
DXF is also vector based.
An then it is a question of how you want to carve this.
For example: V-carving uses variable depths for the stroke variation.
When large enough and with a fine tool then pocketing is an option.
As last: There are several (free) tools out there that convert bitmaps like these in G-Code.
Again, some will preform better than others.
Regards,
CVH
