Does anybody besides me remember the good old service bureau days of the 1990s? When the offset printer down the recommend would recommend your service bureau to output film from Coreldraw 3.0? Or how about Pagemaker 4.0? Better yet, the customer would come in with a really, really weird raster format and want it converted to Illustrator format. Does anybody remember the TARGA format.
Oh, the best yet, somebody would come in with a picture drawn on a piece of paper and want it converted to vector. So you would scan it and bring it into Illustrator and use the trace function to try and make something that wasn't complete garbage. Ah bliss, those were the days, when geeks were geeks and Google didn't exist and you have to look up the answers in real reference manuals.
Of course, now we have vector magic to convert bitmaps to vector, and it's gotten even better over the last year. I blogged about Vector Magic a year ago, and since then, they have added functionality of exporting to AI, DXF (in addition to EPS, SVG, and PDF). If you create an online account with them, you can use them for free (For one of my kids' preschool, I converted their raster logo to EPS so they could make fridge magnets). Their desktop application clocks in at about $295, which seems a bit pricey, but there are still prepress shop today that charge $50 an hour to trace logos, so there is most likely a market for that.
Well, I guess the good ole days are gone for good. Ah, I'm kidding. The crap I used to see when working in the service bureaus drove me nearly crazy, and I wasn't the only one who nearly went nuts.
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