I learned Adobe Illustrator in graduate school, and have used it to generate hundreds and hundreds of musical examples over the years. I used to get it for free from IU as part of the (excellent) [IUware][iuware] program, but then I graduated, and my gravy train ran out.1

I still need to make examples occasionally, either on contract as favors to other people (read: Carolyn), but I sure as hell don’t want to pay a monthly fee to use Illustrator. So I bought a copy of [Affinity Designer][designer], which is . . . fine. Except that it doesn’t do a lot of things I’d come to expect from Illustrator: you can’t make a line with an arrowhead on the end of it.2

So earlier this week, Carolyn says “hey, can you make me a little graphic for my signature?” In Illustrator, this is really easy: scan the signature, live-trace it, and clean it up a bit. So I fired up Affinity Designer, searched for the live-trace feature, and couldn’t find it.

And indeed, it seems, somehow, that this vector drawing program doesn’t have a tracing feature. Some searching suggests that I could do it in Inkscape could do it and import the resulting SVG, but that seemed tedious. Some further searching suggested that Inkscape uses the [potrace][potrace] algorithm for tracing, and that it’s better than Illustrator anyway.

Aha! We’re off to the races now.

Open up the resulting PDF and find a beautifully traced signature, with no noise. Converted it to a PNG in Preview, emailed it to Carolyn. Job done.

  1. I actually paid for a subscription to Adobe Flash for a year or so in 2016 to maintain a bunch of examples I originally made in 2011. Then my MTO article came out and I cancelled that nonsense immediately. ↩︎

  2. Yes, you read that right. [iuware]: https://iuware.iu.edu [designer]: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/ [potrace]: http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ ↩︎

Tagged: misc, programming