Hi,

Tracing bitmaps might leave small path 'blobs' in the final trace. is there an extension or tool to remove these, as part of a post-processing step after tracing?
The tracing bitmap tutorial suggests using Path -> Simplify (Ctrl+L) to reduce the number of nodes, but Simplify doesnt remove path blobs themselves, it only reduces the number of nodes within them.

I guess the effect I'm asking for could be equivalent to a Despeckle filter (as seen in e.g. GIMP) or Symmetric Nearest Neighbor - (obviously these are rasterization-based, but to give a sense of what I'm after).

I absolutely have no clue what you like to have as a result from this snippet. Gimp Colors->Threshold can help to get a clearer shape. Depending on the image you can then select by color via click+drag - once you get the amount you want to keep go Select->To Path and at the path tab go Export Path="yxz".svg. In Inkscape (1.3b) you can use Path->Split-Path to isolate the big from the small parts.

Just saw the svg. With 1.3b you can use Path->Split Path to separate the wheat from the chaff:

There once was a request in this forum how to get rid of tiny vector parts. Maybe try a forum search with fingers crossed. ;-)

@Polygon: thanks for your prompt reply, this solved much of my problem. Apologize if the attachments were confusing.

I was only aware of Path -> Break Apart, not the Path -> Split paths function (which splits into non-overlapping sections).

There is some implied manual selection labor afterwards - I would manually need to differentiate which blobs are too small, select and remove them. But as long as the shapes I need to recover are not too many (e.g. just one, three, ten), this would work much better,

Thanks for your help.

@Polygon  maybe your 'Split Path' suggestion would be worth including in the trace bitmap tutorial. Just an idea! :)

Split Path is a relatively new function afaik.

Have you tried adjusting the "Speckles" option while tracing? So far as I understand, that option is there specifically to solve this particular issue.

I´ve tried but it seems to do nothing currently in 1.3beta. Color Quantisation might be a better option here followed by Split Path on the result.

I'm on 1.2.1, and the speckles option does appear to work. (Perhaps that should be reported as a bug, if you're able to consistently reproduce it.)