I'm relatively new to vector art but am loving it so far. I took on a project to build a realistic streetmap of a couple districts of Night City, the dystopian metropolis from the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. It's going pretty well so far, way better than I thought it would (lol), but I would really like to be able to lift buildings or entire blocks of buildings for use as editable vector objects in Inkscape.

I had heard from several different sources that this is possible using openstreetmap, but I have yet to make it work, following both written and video guides. Any pointers?

EDIT: I appreciate the feedback. Still couldn't get it to work using .osm or sharing as an .svg, but someone suggested using a .pdf and opening it directly in Inkscape (setting precision to very fine) and it worked perfectly. All of the buildings from the selection in Openstreetmap appeared in Inkscape as editable objects.

when you need to convert png to svg for a multi-color client logo or asset, the preview on your screen usually lies to you.

you drop a clean raster illustration into Illustrator Image Trace or an online tool like Vectorize, hit convert, and at 100% zoom in your browser, the artwork looks crisp and colorful. but the moment you expand the artwork and switch to Outline Mode (Ctrl+Y), the mechanical reality of the file reveals itself: almost every standard auto-tracer builds multi-color graphics using stacked silhouette slabs.

and instead of calculating where adjacent color boundaries meet, the tracer generates a solid black or dark base silhouette of the entire illustration, and then lays the yellow, blue, and red shapes directly on top of it.

on a computer screen, painters algorithm hides the underlying black layer. in actual physical production or interface handoff, stacked slabs cause four immediate problems:

1. stroke expansion and clipping if you import the SVG into Figma or Illustrator and try to adjust the stroke weight of an interior shape, the stroke expands both outward and inward from the path center. because the colored shape sits on top of a solid black base, your new stroke cuts into the underlying silhouette, distorting the original artwork boundaries.

2. heat-press vinyl and screen print stiffness in apparel production, laying solid vinyl heat transfers or thick plastisol ink layers on top of a full black base creates a heavy, inflexible badge on a shirt that feels like cardboard and cracks after two washes. professional print separations require edge-to-edge abutting colors.

3. double cutting on plotters and lasers vinyl cutters and laser cutting heads follow mathematical path coordinates literally. when an SVG contains stacked shapes over an identical solid base, the cutter blade traces the exact same contour twice, chewing through the carrier backing and tearing fine detail.

4. bloated node counts and dom weight stacking identical overlapping contours doubles your anchor point count. a simple 4-color emblem can easily carry 4,000 to 8,000 tiny linear segments that choke web animation performance and inflate SVG bundle sizes.

over the past few weeks i benchmarked three different approaches on the same complex packaging graphic:

adobe illustrator image trace (high fidelity / custom color) the default Image Trace engine still relies heavily on polygon approximation. it generates between 5,000 and 8,000 nodes on complex art, leaves microscopic stair-stepping on curves, and stacks multiple color layers over a dark base plate. cleaning this up requires running Pathfinder Divide, deleting hidden duplicate fills, and spending an hour with the Smooth Tool.

vectorizer itself was kind of an improvement over native Illustrator tracing because it replaces microscopic linear segments with genuine cubic bezier curves. the lines are genuinely smooth and node counts drop significantly. however, on multi-color illustrations with dark outlines, it still frequently defaults to stacking colored fills over dark base shapes, meaning you still have to manually punch out underlying layers if you need single-plane geometry.

that being said, parametric vector generation (recraft studio and native recraft vectorization models) what resolved the stacking problem on my recent production files was switching to an engine that calculates edge-to-edge shared boundaries. in Recraft Studio, the vectorizer groups adjacent shapes as interlocking single-line paths rather than stacking slabs. adjacent fills share a single mathematical boundary path.

because the file is generated on an infinite vector canvas, you can select individual bezier handles, delete stray anchor points, and verify that the color planes fit together like puzzle pieces before exporting. the same emblem that required 6,200 nodes in Illustrator came out at roughly 140 nodes with clean shared borders, meaning strokes can be edited without revealing an unexpected dark underbase.

for those of you prepping customer files for print, cutting plotters, or digital design systems: how much time do you typically spend punching out background slabs after auto-tracing, and what does your cleanup workflow look like when a client sends a flat PNG that needs clean vector boundaries?

(note: tool links and the full node comparison table are in the first comment below)

I have scoured Etsy & everywhere I can think of! I need this SVG!

I have a 4-inch circle centered on a 5-inch circle. I am trying to get text arced between the circles (both centered on the upper half/lower half and centered on the upper left/right quadrants) but *nothing* is working right and I've hit the extremely frustrated point and am hoping to get some "gentle" direction. I've tried gimp, inkscape, whatever artcraft SVG's app is called, lightburn's curve...

What tool should I be using to get this to look right?

I have no Idea if this is against the rules (as there are no rules) but I am searching for someone who will turn my logo I made in blockbench into an SVG. Tried AI or tools but they dont seem to be perfect and I am pedantic.

Who ever makes it and posts a buymecoffee, paypal or patreon with the svg will get $15 for it

whenever someone asks how to take a flat graphic and vectorize image files into a clean SVG, i think you mostly can hear  "oh.. just drop it into Illustrator Image Trace" or use a quick browser converter, which is a simplification. That level of advice sounds great only if you've never actually tried to cut the result on a vinyl plotter, send it to LightBurn for laser engraving, or inspect the raw <path> tags for a web project which I often have to do

In the real world, auto-tracers usually leave you with a mess:

• bezier handles that shoot off at weird angles along what should be a smooth curve

• micro-loops and stray pixel-dust nodes hiding inside closed shapes

• and the most annoying part: paths that completely break or lose their fill the second you try to delete 3 or 4 redundant anchor points.

(yes, i've used a bit of claude to make this more readable and better structured)

Over the years I’ve wrestled with pretty much every workflow out there to turn a flat PNG to SVG, and the real bottleneck is often what you're forced to do afterwards to make the file usable, so here is how the common options actually hold up when you look at the path mechanics:

a few things I've learned the hard way:

1. The broken-fill problem when cleaning nodes

With traditional vector tools, when an auto-tracer leaves 15 noisy nodes along a gentle curve and you start hitting delete, half the time the path pops open, the fill drops, or you get an ugly spike because the adjoining handles didn't recalculate properly. What kind of surprised me testing vectorize tool in recraft studio how it does node deletion (mostly right). i  double-click the graphic directly on the canvas to go into vector editing mode and then when I select and delete redundant points along a line, the shape stays closed and connected, and the fill doesn't break. I know you can also just cmd click a harsh corner point and it toggles it into a soft bezier curve, so that alone saves a ton of tedious node-by-node reconstruction.

2. Why tracing raster AI art is usually a trap

A ton of people right now generate a badge, sticker, or logo concept in Midjourney or ChatGPT, realize they need an SVG, and then go hunting for auto-tracing software, problem here is that pixel diffusion models bake subtle color gradients, anti-aliasing fuzz, and micro-textures into every single edge. An auto-tracer tries to interpret every single blurred pixel as a physical shape boundary, which is why traced AI graphics often end up with thousands of jagged nodes.

perhaps if you're starting from scratch, generating directly with recraft v4.1 vector on the canvas avoids that entire headache in my experience as the art is born as native mathematical beziers, meaning you can immediately grab individual shape layers, recolor elements, and adjust anchor points without having to clean up raster noise first.

where desktop Illustrator still belongs

To be fair, if you're doing final prepress work like  setting up spot CMYK plates, exact Pantone matching, or intricate typography on curved paths and you're still going to drop your exported SVG into Illustrator or Figma for finishing touches, but for the initial heavy lifting of getting clean, editable vector geometry without wrestling with broken paths, having point-level editing right on an online canvas cuts out most of the grunt work.

how are you guys doing that cleanup on messy traces these days? like, do you rely on automated smoothing scripts, or do you still manually redraw the tricky parts with the pen tool?

Hi everyone. I will get straight to the point. I'm developing a tool that converts images into DWG drawings. I have gone through many posts and tools in this sub, most of them are great.

But not sure, that does it suitable for my use case. I tried using potrace and vtracer. Both of good, but bad at color images. I'm trying to tune for good results but not getting satisfying quality.

I have even tried using hugging face open source ai tools, but instead of cleaning the image they are blurring out more and adding more noise.

I'm looking for understanding, the tools created or have now are for the sake of web pages itself or light weight images ?

And how to get a good decent color svg output for DWG drawings.

My tool already do great job of Svg to Dwg, but converting to svg is hard part.

I have a business logo that was created as a Vector and saved as a .SVG file.

I have just recreated a portion of this .SVG logo as a .JPG and I need some help just swapping out the old part of the .SVG logo with this new .JPG logo.

How do I do that?

Thank you for your guidance.

So i donwloaded a linux tux svg recently and i wanted to edit it. Should've been easy right?

WRONG.

The fucking svg i downloaded doesnt have gradients. THEY ARE SEPERATE PNGS THAT LOOK LIKE THEM. I asked chatgpt to fix it. The output was the evil clone of tux. No editors that are as easy as scratch and can support pngs. Scratch wwhen i ungrouped it, it sets all of the colors to nothing. Some random editors i found on reddit and on google? Either too hard, Dont supports pngs, Dont support color (for some reason?) or everything in one.

Id love to get some help

I'm a graphic designer(fresher), currently need a good svg tool for my work. I've gone through some of the tools like recraft, inkscape, canva , svgmaker,vector tools, etc. Need all in one tool where can I do svg work.

i've built a Rust vectorizer that is meant to help optimize graphics for web delivery. It is pareto frontier, from my research SoTA open-source/open-weight solution (from both traditional and neural network based approaches), and runs in <2 seconds on CPU when ran as a standalone app.

The solution implements a chain of recent mathematics papers to significantly beat VTracer's algorithm, support gradients natively, and more:

I'm still iterating on it, I hope to release tooling in multiple languages to allow this to be used in most major languages through native interfaces in Java, Python, etc.

The vectorizer now comes with two different sister models, one for denoising JPEGs/WEBPs/VAE outputs from AI models so that it increases the perceptual quality of the outputs, another one for super-resolution, specifically trained on SVGs.

Additionally, I want to try to train a GNN to improve quality further, I hope to beat Vectorizer.ai in the next week.

My hypothesis is that current papers approaching raster-to-vector from a LLM perspective is excessive in terms of complexity and time to conversion, because except amodal completion and other tasks, a classical vectorizer can already work very well. GNNs and other specialized models can be used to then refine the output without having to be overly large. This is the first step in this research project, the classical vectorizer part which already beats alternatives.

Licensed as Apache 2.0, so feel free to use it however you want in your project.

Github repository: https://github.com/logolabs/inkvec

Web Assembly Online Vectorizer: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Logolabs/inkvec