README.OS2 for potrace 1.10
---------------------------

This is Peter Selinger's potrace version 1.10 built for OS/2.

Potrace is a utility for "tracing" a bitmapped image.  That is to say, it takes
as input a bitmap (raster) image, and converts it into a vector image which can
be scaled arbitrarily.

Potrace operates on monochrome images.  For support of greyscale images, the 
potrace package includes mkbitmap, a prefilter utility designed to convert such
images to black and white without significant loss of detail.  There are some 
advanced techniques for handling colour images but these generally require 
additional software; the potrace FAQ (http://potrace.sourceforge.net/faq.html)
has more information.

The basic procedure is: 

 1. Save your image as a bitmap (Windows BMP or Unix-style PBM/PGM/PPM).
 2. If the image is not pure 2-bit black-and-white, run mkbitmap on it.  This
    intelligently converts the image to monochrome PBM format. (This program 
    has many options but the defaults are often sufficient.)
 3. Run potrace on the PBM file.  By default it generates an EPS (Encapsulated
    PostScript) file.  Various other output formats are also possible; for 
    instance, the '-s' switch will generate a SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
    file.

See the file README for more information about potrace.

This build requires the GCC 4.52 OS/2 runtime library (GCC452.DLL).  This is
available as part of the 'gcc4core' package available on Netlabs and from 
various other sources.

The current build was compiled without zlib support, which means that level 3
Postscript compression is not supported.


INSTALLING

Make sure that GCC452.DLL is installed on your system.

Place the contents of bin\ into a directory on your PATH.  If you have a man 
page viewer installed, optionally place the contents of man\ into a directory
on your MANPATH.  Place the contents of doc\ wherever you like.


-- 
Potrace(TM) is (C) 2001-2011 Peter Selinger - http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ 
OS/2 binary compiled by Alex Taylor - http://www.altsan.org/