Get the portable version and you can run it from anywhere.ġ.-Take a screenshot of the text at a high zoom level, and paste into your favorite graphics editor.įor best results, the image should be in bold dark color on a pale or white background, with good contrast and strong smooth lines. Inkscape, a free and open source drawing program, to create the bitmap tracing. Irfanview (freeware is easy to use, and can automatically save screenshots in various formats. But this little procedure is easy as can be, and only needs a few mouse-clicks to accomplish.Ī graphics editor to tweak and crop your source image. Tutorials about creating Scalable Vector Graphics (in a text editor!) can seem very complex, and Inkscape is mystifying for a new user like me. It can be used for images other than text. For example, a screenshot, or a page from a pdf document, or a logo created in a graphics editor.

This process is very useful if the only thing available is a graphic in raster format (bitmap, png, etc). If you have a foreign-language text fragment but can't use an embedded font, or a beautiful fleuron you want to use as a section divider, or even a page of simple text that you want to keep on a single page, such as a title-page, bitmap-tracing might be the answer. Edited / updated 16 April 2014 to add information in steps 8, 9, 10, and a link in the P.S.

Inkscape trace bitmap outline