TraceART

Drawing does not only refer to doodles and paintings to hang on walls or display in art galleries, but also used in construction in order to create blueprints and other designs. The computer puts different such tools at your disposal for more accuracy, but different file formats are used to store various data. If you need to edit sections of normal pictures for technical purposes, TraceART might be just what you need to perform a simple conversion.

With the main window up, accommodation takes a little while thanks to the simple design, with the upper toolbar filled with different edit and view functions, a large canvas, as well as a side panel to handle properties. Initializing a project is as easy as dragging the source file over the main window, or using the built-in open dialog.

Once this is done, you can perform a series of different operations. These aren't abundant, considering the files you work with are raster graphics, with the purpose and result being to generate a vector image out of the original. However, there is a dedicated menu entry that holds several raster functions.

Amongst others, you can invert, rotate, mirror, flip, crop, and resample. Since it's dedicated to scientific approach on images, there aren't any visual enhancements except for options to fill holes, median filter, or adjust color settings.

General drawing tools can be used before and after image processing. These help in design, being based on vectors, such as lines, polylines, solid triangle, as well as several types of arcs and circles. An additional measuring tool lets you view distance and angle for more precision.

Hitting the “trace” button, the one that looks like “play”, brings up a setup screen to configure the process. Three types of detection can be used, such as outline, center line, and fill pattern. Additional options let you select scale, with the possibility to also pick a custom area.

Each type comes with its own set of parameters you can modify. This directly affects line detection, making it thoroughly look for adjacent lines, angles, mixed-up lines and more. A preview area is attached to the configuration screen to view the effect before having it applied.

In terms of file support, the application does a good job at both import and export options. Needless to say that you can load popular raster images like JPG, BMP, TIF, TGA, and PCX, while output lets you generate more specialized formats such as DXF, WMF, PLT, SVG, EPS, PDF, as well as CGM.

Bottom line is that TraceART is a handy application engineers might want to keep around to help with blueprint design and schematic analysis. It's packed with different tools to handle both raster and vector images, with neat file support for load and save, while accommodation is a walk in the park thanks to the intuitive, simple interface design.