Centerline tracing

[pegotes]

It would be good for the "trace bitmap" feature to be capable of "centerline tracing": producing stroked paths which follow a path's centerlines rather than filled paths conforming to its outline. Autotrace can now do this, but it's not (as far as I know) supported by potrace.

[pegotes (arka6969)]

Aplication for centerline vector recognisition

[Petr Dlouhý (petr-dlouhy)]

I am missing this feature too.

[MenTaLguY (mental-deactivatedaccount)]

I would be nice to have.

[MenTaLguY (mental-deactivatedaccount)]

This is a legitimate feature request.

[MenTaLguY (mental-deactivatedaccount)]

One issue I'm slightly concerned about is that (at the time I was working on autotrace, almost ten years ago), there were patent issues surrounding centerline tracing. (Perhaps the patents have expired in the meantime?)

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Related:
Bug #170537 (sf1099467) “build in autotrace”

[Hachmann (marenhachmann)]

For those who come along here searching for the feature, there is an extension that can do that:
https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-centerline-trace

Only depends on Pillow/PIL.

Maybe could be included? Currently hits an error on Windows with
"The _imaging C module is not installed", though.

[Spencer Bliven (quantum7)]

I found myself wishing for this feature today and looked into it a bit.

Autotrace is long inactive and has been removed from most package managers due to egregious security issues (https://blogs.gentoo.org/ago/2017/05/20/autotrace-multiple-vulnerabilities-the-autotrace-nightmare/). The centerline plugin depended on autotrace, so it is also a poor choice (https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-centerline-trace/issues/13). Centerline tracing would be a great feature, but I think it's going to have to be written from scratch.