Potrace

If you work as a graphic designer, you probably understand that some image formats are often subjected to certain limitations regarding resolution, smoothness or render quality.

Fortunately, in this situation, you can turn to specialized third-party applications such as Potrace that can help you achieve satisfactory results by providing you with all the necessary tools.

Potrace is a lightweight application that allows you to trace bitmaps, which consists of smoothing a bitmap and making it scalable. It supports handling PBM, PGM, BMP or PPM input files and the results are exported to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) documents by default.

It can be used to extract the contents of scanned documents (such as logos, notes or official documents), export them to an EPS file and render the resulting image at any resolution without them being blurred or having jagged edges. Among the supported output formats, you can find EPS< PDF, SVG, DXF, PGM, XFig, GeoJSON, PostScript and Gimppath.

Since it is portable, it does not require you to install it on the target computer, as simply extracting the contents of the archive it comes packed in and launching the executable grants you total access to its features.

More so, you can run it from removable storage media such as USB flash drives or external HDDs without worrying about it creating additional files or folders on your computer (without your explicit permission) or tampering with your registry entries.

Unfortunately, one of the traits that can prove to be disconcerting to less experienced PC users is Potrace's lack of a standard Graphical User Interface (GUI). Although its Command Line Interface (CLI) lets you view a list of arguments along with their brief descriptions, novices might find it difficult to understand and operate its controls efficiently.

Potrace is a lightweight application that can help you trace bitmaps by smoothing them and making them scalable. It does not require installation and comes with a Command Line Interface, which might be hard to use by novices, despite the fact that it offers brief descriptions of its arguments.