Re: lines to vectors, vectors to GIF, [was RE: Back to

David,


On your first question, I don’t know of any tool that does the job you require unless there’s a key way the overlapping curves are differentiated (colour, thickness?). If they were differentiated that way you could filter the bitmap image by those criteria, effectively creating a layer with just those curves which you could then convert into vector format, but I suspect from your example such criteria don’t exist. The problem is too broad for existing vectorisation tools to do from scratch, so any factoring of the image you can do will be necessary (and might wind up being more work than tracing by hand, if you’re adept at using Illustrator with a pen & pad, for example).


On your second question, Tumult Hype (http://tumult.com/hype/ <http://tumult.com/hype/>) is a flash competitor that uses HTML5 as it’s technology base, including SVG. It uses a javascript animation engine, but can import SVGs with SMIL animations; I’m not sure how they’ll transition to exporting, but it does support export of animated GIFs. You could download their trial version to test it? I’m not a Tumult employee but I purchased v1 of their software. 


Please let me know if you crack any of this, it’s something I’ve struggled with (and had to move on from) previously.


Thanks,
Oliver.
http://getbulb.com <http://getbulb.com/>