auto-trace?

I'd ask for at least 600 dpi.

They probably expect you to deal with it.

Bob

Ask for a copy of the original art.

It is unlikely the original is 72 DPI.

Tom

John,

The Autotrace function does work best when you have clean, hi-res artwork; you know the saying "garbage in, garbage out." Also, Autotrace really works best on "fill" artwork, that is, it's not a good solution for converting a scanned AutoCAD drawing. It is good when you have solid fill areas that Autotrace can build an outline around.

If you have a photo-editing program like PhotoShop or Corel PaintshopPro, it helps to do some pre-processing of the image to clean it up, get good contrast, brightness, and de-saturate (black and white) if appropriate. Make sure you save out as a lossless format and not jpeg.

Your first avenue should always be to try to get the original artwork file. What's best is if you can get the vector file; i.e. Adobe Illustrator file and open it directly - this will always be better quality than what AutoTrace can do. If not, try some of the above suggestions. Even if AutoTrace does not give you a perfect result, but something more like 80 percent, you can then alter/correct the remaining 20% of the problems.

Hope this helps

Thanks Mark , Tom, et al.

The file is `fill' artwork-just black&white solid lettering. I don't have any of those packages you mention loaded locally. My wife is a digital artist and has Painter, Photoshop and some others but not Illustrator. (I know she used to have Corel Draw ages ago, but don't know if she still does.) I may need to hire her to clean it up and output the highest res version she can come up with. The inventor who provided this .bmp file is not being real co-operative.

Does anybody know of a graphics package that can output dxf? I truly think that is my best bet and then I don't have to worry about Auto-trace at all.

Thanks again, jk

I used Corel Draw, been some years but it has a trace function (OCR) and it will export DXF.

I am sure there are a lot of programs out there. Here is one you can down load a trial version of ArtCAM that will convert it.

Raster to Vector threads alt.machines.cnc

Hey Tom-yu da man.

That was exactly what I needed. Took me a little time to figure out how to use it, but I was able to vectorize the image and ultimately make my dxf file.

Thank you very much for the tip/link.

jk

Illustrator outputs a dxf

...and SolidWorks opens Illustrator files. In my experience this gives cleaner geometry, and as an inhernetly lazy person it also saves a step. Ed