tablet + custom Illustrator brushes (and/or Adobe Streamline RIP :^) — still doing stuff with it)

very simply:

open Illustrator
Place image
Object - Live Trace - Make and Expand
(you may want to experiment with Trace Options to see how close to the origianl you want to get)

You’re done.

For more info: http://graphicssoft.about.com/b/a/184934.htm

I just did a demo of this feature in my lecture series I conducted in Dallas last month. You can get the vector image to look exactly like te sketch if you’d like. with fewer than four clicks. The nice thing is, of course, that the image can then be enlarged to any size you like without any resolution issues.

I tried it, but it does lose some detail.

You have to fine tune it but it will duplicate your drawing if you practice enough to master the tool.

This is your drawing?

Fiddle with the Trace Options. You can get it to just about match exactly. I’ve gotten some remarkable detail on color photographs that look very close to the originals, so this b/w should be doable.

No its not my sketch, but its like some stuff I have yet to scan.

What should I fiddle with besides min. area & threshold?

One more thing you might try would be to scan your original drawing larger, so that the details are larger and any averaging by Live Trace will be lessened.

I miss StreamLine. It doesn’t appear that Streamline’s feature set was fully absorbed by AI (or perhaps I just incorrectly remember StreamLine’s capabilities as being better than they were).

Another option is to trace it in Flash. Flash has some decent auto-tracing features as well.

If you aren’t afraid of the command line potrace does an excellent job (better than any commercial tracers I’ve seen). If the command line isn’t your thing, there is a java based GUI available for potrace that will output SVGs. I haven’t used it, so I can’t vouch for its user friendliness. The GUI called delineate.

That being said, the drawing is a little hairy for auto-trace. If you want it to look sketchy, you would be better off using a high res bitmap. If you want a clean, smoothed out vector version you would probably be better off tracing it by hand in Illustrator/Vector software of your choice.

There’s a new free bitmap - svg converter that I haven’t tried yet.

http://www.inkscape.org/

Fred-
Sorry. I was out of town for a few days.

Try this, and see what you get. I ended up with a vector image that was almost indistinguishable from the original:

Place image in Illustrator.
Scale image up about 30-50% (it may look pixelated, but don’t worry)

Select image — Go to Live Trace — Trace Options

From the default, swith to the following settings (and, again, experiment on your own if you’d like):
MODE: Grayscale
MAX: 6 colors
PATH FITTING: 1 px
MIN AREA: 1px
CORNER ANGLE: 10

If you’d like, I can send you a pdf of my result. As I stated, it was pretty much exactly like the original.

Give it a try, and good luck!

Awesome!!!

did it work better for you?

[edited, because I CAN]
The live trace feature rocks. in my talk, i created (on a challenge) a psychodelic hendrix poster in 60 seconds, using a live traced image. pretty cool.

Inkscape, in fact, uses the potrace engine for tracing bitmaps, so you don’t have to mess with the command line if you don’t want to. Color Quantization needs to be further automated, IMO.

http://inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html