Someone please explain to me in detail what a vector trace is.

It isn't in the wiki and to my knowledge based on what I've seen elsewhere a vector trace is when you remove everything except for choice part(s) like character(s) so I've labeled a few images I've uploaded like that as such but those tags have been removed.

The way I understand it, a *real* vector trace would be if you traced all the lines/shapes of a drawing in a vector graphics program and saved it in a vector format like SVG. Vector graphics have the property that you can scale them arbitrarily because they consist of mathematical descriptions of shapes, arcs, etc., not just a bunch of pixels. Apparently, some people do the tracing but then save the result as a scaled-up pixel image (e.g. in jpeg format), which defeats the entire point of vector graphics, and then mistakenly call it vector trace.

I beleive a vector trace is just that, someone manually traced the original drawing in photoshop or illustrator or something like that to generate a vector drawing. Usually this would be done to allow for the picture to be resized cleanly, since vector drawings scale without pixelization or loss of information like raster images do. A lot of wallpapers are made this way.

One way to tell if it has been vectorized is that usually the shading becomes pretty flat, since all a vector drawing is is a set of shapes filled with colors or gradients or the like.

It's true that usually the backgrounds get "cropped out", but if someone wanted to do a lot of extra work, they could vectorize the background as well. Usually that isn't really wanted anyway.

*edit: also what 0xC0FFEE said*

On danbooru it's images that were traced in a vector graphics program and saved as a pixel image, as danbooru doesn't support the SVG format.

0xC0FFEE said:
Apparently, some people do the tracing but then save the result as a scaled-up pixel image (e.g. in jpeg format), which defeats the entire point of vector graphics, and then mistakenly call it vector trace.

Well, that perfectly describes my understanding/misunderstanding of the situation. Thanks.

0xC0FFEE said:
Apparently, some people do the tracing but then save the result as a scaled-up pixel image (e.g. in jpeg format), which defeats the entire point of vector graphics, and then mistakenly call it vector trace.

...its more like that it'd be monumentally inane to leave it in its original vector format.

Log said:
as danbooru doesn't support the SVG format.

Actually almost nothing but the image editors used to vectorize support vector graphic formats. (with some exceptions, Flash is specialized but common, SVG is starting to gain some support). In general though vector art needs to be rasterized to be of much use.

Opera supports it out of the box. Doesn't FF too? It should by now...

But it's true, SVG isn't useful unless you want to print it out, most of the time people just make wallpapers out of it anyway and those need to be in a pixel format.

piespy said:
Opera supports it out of the box. Doesn't FF too? It should by now...

But it's true, SVG isn't useful unless you want to print it out, most of the time people just make wallpapers out of it anyway and those need to be in a pixel format.

It does, both 1.5.x and 2.x, imho danbooru should support it too.

Firefox doesn't have full SVG support yet. I don't know about Opera though.

Quess said:
Firefox doesn't have full SVG support yet. I don't know about Opera though.

I've never had a problem displaying .svg files though, so what's missing of "full SVG support"?

Shuugo said:
I've never had a problem displaying .svg files though, so what's missing of "full SVG support"?

If someone creates SVG art or vector trace utilizing features that are still not supported by the browser, it could look distorted.

Quess said:
If someone creates SVG art or vector trace utilizing features that are still not supported by the browser, it could look distorted.

Ah so I've never had that luck, well thanks for the info. I usually open SVGs with ff by default, now I would know what to do if they look bad