Breaking Down a PDF

[Ghosty_Whosty_117]

Good Evening,

So this is an odd thing, i'm looking at assisting my wife with her crafts, she is huge into paper crafts at the moment and we finally got her a Cricut and we have been fiddling with using the machine to do her cuts and scoring happy days. Problem is that we use Inkscape to break down the PDF's to do what we need and sometimes the PDF's come over as a single image instead of a properly grouped image that we can manipulate. Is there anyway to use gimp to split out the PDF's. I found a way in Inkscape but it involves breaking the entire image down into a bit map and mapping/ grouping the entire file node by node... any hep would be amazing.

[rich2005]

(06-04-2024, 12:51 AM)Ghosty_Whosty_117 Wrote: Good Evening,

So this is an odd thing, i'm looking at assisting my wife with her crafts, she is huge into paper crafts at the moment and we finally got her a Cricut and we have been fiddling with using the machine to do her cuts and scoring happy days. Problem is that we use Inkscape to break down the PDF's to do what we need and sometimes the PDF's come over as a single image instead of a properly grouped image that we can manipulate. Is there anyway to use gimp to split out the PDF's. I found a way in Inkscape but it involves breaking the entire image down into a bit map and mapping/ grouping the entire file node by node... any hep would be amazing.

There is one forum contributor who is experienced in cutting machines, hopefully he will turn up with relevant advice.

In the meantime, as you found, a PDF is just a wrapper around a graphic image (bitmaps), svg objects or a mix of both.  From a search Circut can use both images and SVG shapes.  You are probably better off using Inkscape to trace a bitmap image but it can be done in Gimp.

The same as Inkscape, Gimp uses Autotrace, the difference is you need to install Autotrace yourself.  Two files in the attached zip file. autotrace.exe and this goes in your Gimp installation. Put it in C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\bin The file plugin-autotracw-preview.py goes in your Gimp plugins folder, C:\Users\"yourname"\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\2.10\plug-ins.

What does it do? It will trace a bitmap image, make a Gimp path of the trace and render an svg file.

In Win10 / Gimp 2.10.38 An all-in-one screenshot:

   

1. The bitmap image
2. The plugin which registers in Filters -> Edge-Detect -> Autotrace
3. The Gimp path the plugin creates
4. The SVG file the plugin creates. Find it in C:\Users\"yourname"\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\2.10\tmp folder
5. The SVG file open in a viewer. It does open in Inkscape. 

That is a simple example, a lot depends on your images.  There are some examples here: http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=20776