On Tue, 2025-07-29 at 02:01 +0200, Jan Claeys wrote: > On Mon, 2025-07-28 at 15:43 -0700, Dan Hitt wrote: > > I'm looking for a piece of desktop software, ideally free, that > > will > > help me to interactively convert some old hand-drawn jpg diagrams > > to > > svg. > > > > It should recognize simple geometric forms like straight lines, > > triangles, rectangles, and curves such as circles and ellipses. > > It's probably too much to expect it to do OCR on handwriting, but > > it > > should have a way of adding annotations in various fonts and sizes. > > > > The interface perhaps would show the original hand-drawn jpg in > > some > > kind of background pane, with the suggested and modifiable svg as > > an > > overlay. > > Potrace/libpotrace is a command line utility & library that can trace > bitmaps to vector graphics. I don't think it specifically recognises > geometric forms, but maybe it's still useful... > > Some desktop software like Inkscape can also use the library, so it > might also be useful to look into that.
Although they can't trace out your figures, xfig and tgif are both free object-oriented drawing (not painting) programs into which you can import a graphic (of almost any representation — png, jpg, gif, …) and then superimpose your lines, circles, ellipses, text, ….
