bulk conversion from png to ai available?

Hi David,

I don't think so, currently, as the SaveAs commandline parameter only opens the Save As dialog in the gui currently and doesn't take arguments. And the tracing verb 'SelectionTrace' also just opens the dialog...

Bulk conversion from svg to pdf, eps, ps, emf and wmf would be possible.

What I would do if I wanted this would be to

- set aside a lot of time for this
- use imagemagick to convert from png to pbm
- do some pre-processing (split by color) as potrace does not trace colors (see potrace FAQ: http://potrace.sourceforge.net/faq.html)
- use potrace to convert pbm to svg
- put the color layers together again
- skip conversion to AI, as Illustrator can open SVG files, and I think there's no good opensource tool that can convert *to* AI. It would always be running behind a changing proprietary file format... Or maybe a renamed pdf file would still work.

- or maybe I'd ask the guys from openclipart how they do their conversions on their server. They allow uploads of bitmap files to be converted to svg automatically.

So, no, this is not trivial, and it's not possible with Inkscape currently.

Kind regards,
 Maren

(and Inkscape does no longer 'Save As...' AI)

On 2016-02-04 01:07 (+0100), Hachmann wrote:
> - or maybe I'd ask the guys from openclipart how they do their
> conversions on their server. They allow uploads of bitmap files to be
> converted to svg automatically.

Source (shell script):
https://github.com/openclipart-dev/clipartcam

Cool - thanks for digging, ~suv! But no open source licence... :/ Just a 'copyright'. I've asked about their licencing now :)

Wow - Jon has already answered. CC0, so free to use for anyone :)