Any suggestions for vectorizing or tracing raster PDFs like this?

I’d like to have GF cut items like this for paper modeling, but tracing (Inkscape) does a poor job due to the shading of the raster images. Any tips or should I just bite the bullet and manually draw vectors around these shapes? Example file here: http://www.delta7studios.com/images/Rosie%20model%2003.pdf from Delta 7 Studios.

Thanks

Yeah the Glowforge Tracing function would work really well on that - you click on the white background, and it puts a cutline around everything.

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Whoops! I was just typing pretty much what she said!

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Brilliant. Will give it a try. Thanks.

Inkscape can read PDFs, and if they are embedded images in the pdf you can then use its trace bitmap feature to convert to vector.

Inkscape has a more robust editor than the gf UI, to say the least.

This is what I had tried, but the resulting vectors on curves, etc, were quite jagged. I was looking for a little better, but I’m not real familiar with Inkscape, so wasn’t/am not sure I had correct settings.

Yeah it all depends on your source material quality. If the image is low res it’s hard for Inkscape to get a really solid trace. Likewise it would be hard for the GF ui as well but they may have cracked that with clever optimized software.