Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Taking an example from the help, produces a bitmap with a blue background and a white ellipse with a black outline.

However, if you change the extension of the output I get a white background and a black ellipse.

What I am really trying to do is draw vector graphics on top of an existing bitmap image: Anyone see where I am going wrong?

Thanks,

Dave

If you are wanting to draw vector images on bitmaps, why are you saving as a vector image?



IM is not a vector image processor. yes it can read in vector image, but it can't true output vector images, only raster images embedded ina vector image.

See A word about Vector Image formats
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#vector

Somthing that I mention repeatedally on the forums.


SVG is even worse in that you can not even embed a raster image into that format.
however recent IM's will make use of the library "AutoTrace" (also a program). This program attempts to convert a raster into a vector image. For many images it works reasonably well with only some smoothing and distortion. But it will NEVER reproduce a true raster image.

See IM examples. SVG Output handling
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/draw/#svg_output

also a method of making use of that output to create smooth outlines from pure black and white bitmap images.
Edging using a Raster to Vector Converter
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/transform/#edge_vector

From this you should see IM does not do what you are expecting, as it is not a true vector image processor!

Thanks Anthony. I did see a few notes about how it is not designed to do this, but it seems to be able to do almost everything else, so I thought there may be some 'workaround'! For anyone reading this - my next move is looking into inkscape's xml scripting for automatically drawing vector graphics (ie given a file full or coordinates, draw vector lines between them all).

Dave

You may also like to look at the 'Fig' file format and the XFig or related client programs. It is in many ways similar to inkscape but with a much simpler and very well defined vector file format.