I have been really busy with work, and keeping up with taxes. Now that I am a contractor and not a full time employee, I have to deal with quarterly taxes, while at the same time filing my taxes. Fortunately for me I chose to use H & R Block’s Web service, and not Turbo Tax. After their melt down, I am also grateful that I did not wait, I actually filed completed my taxes April 5; but it took a good week of going back and forth with the professional that H & R Block hooked me up with. Since I itemized, and had to deal with Capitol gains since I liquidated a lot of stuff in an effort to stay afloat the whole process cost me about $120. A whole lot cheaper than the $300 i paid to actually talk to some one at a H&R Block office. So I think I will do it this way from now on.

Now on to the app for today PoTrace is a little application that can take any bitmap and turn it into a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Now what good is this you ask? Well if you want to take a bitmap, and resize it to 200% you get lots of blocky artifacts, and just plain ugly pixelization. While if you do this to an SVG, since there are no real pixels, there is no artifacts, no pixelization, only smooth mathematical lines. So if you are in the sign business, or just taking a picture from JPEG to some poster size then this process will save you a lot of headaches. For examples of what PoTrace can do see here. More advanced applications that pertain to cartooning are here. For some users there will be a problem since there is no GUI, it is all command line. But that also means there is no installer, just download the Windows binary distribution and follow the instructions, and FAQs. I had some real fun converting various bitmaps that I scanned , and then turned into SVGs just to get a decent output for some reports.

[tags]microface, Open Source, trace[/tags]