I had one of my clients call me today and say he wanted to make some T-shirts with his logo picture, that I was using on his website. I said OK and sent him the .jpeg file. He called me back twenty minutes later and said his T-shirt guy wanted the image in a vector graphics format. Now I am not sure why the T-shirt guy wouldn’t have the software to convert it however thats not my problem. In any case I always like to try to find free software to complete tasks like this. I have used a program called Inkscape in Linux many times but I had no idea what to do in Windows. Fortunately, there is a version of Inkscape for windows.
The program Inkscape is available from here
The install is fairly straight forward and I didn’t have any problems.
Here are the few short steps to convert a .jpeg (or any other image) to a .svg file:
- Open Inkscape and in the left hand corner use the “File” option on the toolbar to open your .jpeg image
- Once the file is open, go to the menu bar at top and select “Path” then click on “Trace Bitmap” . This will open a window that will allow you to adjust some settings
- Click “Update” each time you change a setting
- Once you are done editing , chose “File” on the toolbar again and click “Save As” and then select one of the Vector Graphics formats. I used .svg (normal) but you should use whatever the format is that is being requested.
Thats all there is to it and we did it with out expensive Photoshop type programs.
