[Boeman]

Greetings to the art community,

I am currently in the process of converting technical drawings into the versatile vector format. Unfortunately, my poor execution of this procedure has produced less than exceptional results.

My workflow is as follows: Scan line art at 600 PPI; Save as a 2-bit bitmap TIFF image; Open file in Adobe Streamline; Convert to vector format using a generic line art setting; Import into Adobe Illustrator.

The problem occurs with the vector conversion itself; lines are joined at incorrect areas necessitating a great deal of clean up work as a result. For instance, a boy holding a bat is converted with his hand translated as part of the bat he is holding as one single object.

Such instances require that I spend a sizable amount of time knifing segments while joining others in order to form the properly connected object(s). The refinements are so tedious, that in many cases, it has proven more practical to simply trace a template bitmap with Illustrator. In the end, the effort required defeats the purpose for using Streamline.

I am more inclined however, to attribute these difficulties to my inability to utilize Streamline effectively. Being far from a contemporary artist, this should come as no surprise.

I would appreciate some advice regarding this dilemma for those who routinely convert line art for vector applications.

My thanks in advance for any replies forthcoming.

[Dizzogg]

Try this and see if it helps you any

Go to your settings in Streamline

Color/B&W Setup
Posterization: Black and White Only
Edge Smoothing: Maximum
Threshold: 50%

Conversion Setup
Methods: Centerline
Line Thinning: 3
Tolerance: 1.0
Lines: Curved and Straight Lines 3.0
Uniform Line Weight: 1pt. (you can thick and thin this in illustrator....

Try this....Might be of use....might not

[Eudoxus]

Hey Boeman,
hmm, I do technical drawing and I think its a paint in the @$$. Umm, with regards to vector drawing, I used to use Corel Draw. It had a program called ORC Trace, it looked cool, but the conversions for complex drawing were crap. I've played around with illustrator. IT behaves a lot like Corel.

Anyway, my point is vector conversion programs have great difficulty (at the moment) at recognising certain shapes and values.

Just a thought

Oh yeh, have you tweaked much with the scan settings? Experiment and see!

Cheers.