README for pixel2svg

About

pixel2svg converts pixel art to SVG - pixel by pixel.

For example, here is an icon from the Tango Icon Set:

If you scale this up for a nice blocky print, you might get a dithered result:

Of course you can turn dithering off. But sometimes you might want a vector file, especially for large prints. For these cases, pixel2svg produces this SVG file (try clicking to find out whether your browser supports SVG):

tango-heart.svg

Here is a screenshot of the SVG in Inkscape:

Nice, pure vector data.

Prerequisites

Python 3

Python pillow

svgwrite svgwrite 1.4.1 documentation

Gentoo Linux

As of 2021 the dev-python/svgwrite ebuild is masked, you need to add:

>=dev-python/svgwrite-1.4.1 ~amd64

to /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

Then install the 2 python libraries with:

emerge dev-python/pillow dev-python/svgwrite dev-python/numpy

Usage

usage: pixel2svg.py [-h] [--version] [--overlap] [--squaresize SQUARESIZE]
                    [--unit {em,ex,cm,mm,Q,in,pc,pt,px}] [--combine]
                    [--similar SIMILAR]
                    imagefile

Convert pixel art to SVG

positional arguments:
  imagefile             The image file to convert

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             Display the program version
  --overlap             If given, overlap vector squares by 1 unit
  --squaresize SQUARESIZE
                        Width and height of vector squares in pixels, default:
                        40
  --unit {em,ex,cm,mm,Q,in,pc,pt,px}
                        set SVG unit used with --squaresize, default: px
  --combine             If given, combine similar pixels into larger
                        rectangles
  --similar SIMILAR     Configure a numeric value to find a similar color.
                        Larger values make the comparison less sensitive.

Running

pixel2svg.py IMAGE.EXT

will process IMAGE.EXT and create IMAGE.svg

EXT can be any format (png, jpg, bmp, gif and many more) that can be read by the Python Imaging Library. See https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/handbook/image-file-formats.html for details.

License

pixel2svg is licensed under the GPL. See the file COPYING for details.

Author

original version: (c) Florian Berger fberger@florian-berger.de

updates by cyChop at https://github.com/cyChop/pixel2svg-fork

updates by Dirk Jagdmann doj@cubic.org at https://github.com/doj/pixel2svg-fork