Turn an image into a single-line SVG
Every other tracer outlines your artwork, which makes a pen draw each line twice with a gap down the middle. This one follows the centerline instead: one open path per stroke, exactly the way you drew it, ready for a plotter, a foil quill, a Cricut pen, or a laser.
- True centerlines, not outlines: an X is two strokes, not eight
- Tips reach the real ends of your strokes, junctions meet properly
- For AxiDraw, NextDraw, EleksMaker, Cricut pens, foil quills, and lasers
- Preview free with no account, clean download with Pro
Free to try, no account needed. Your first font is free to keep and download.
Try it right here
Drop in a logo, sketch, or clipart. Every mode previews free with no account; the clean file is Pro.
Outline tracing versus centerline tracing
Picture a drawn line 2mm thick. An outline tracer sees the ink as a long thin shape and traces around it, giving you two parallel paths 2mm apart. Hand that to a pen plotter and it dutifully draws both sides and leaves the middle blank, so a confident single stroke comes back as a hollow tube. It is the same problem that makes a Cricut write in bubble letters.
A centerline tracer asks a different question: where did the pen go? It thins the ink down to the path running through the middle of it, so you get one open path per stroke. Drawn back out at any thickness you like, it looks like the original drawing rather than an outline of it.
Why centerlines are hard, and what we do about it
Thinning artwork to its middle is where most attempts fall apart, in three predictable ways, so there is a fix for each.
Junctions turn to mush. Where two strokes cross, the ink is a blob, and its middle wanders, forks, and loops. Crossings are detected and rebuilt as a single meeting point, then the arms are paired by the direction they were travelling, so an X comes out as two straight strokes and a T as a bar plus a stem instead of four stubs around a hole.
Ends pull back. Thinning always retracts the tip of a stroke, leaving lines that stop short of where you drew them. Each free end is regrown along its own direction out to where the pen centre actually stopped, so tails and serifs reach their real ends.
The path comes out noisy. A raw centerline is pixel-jittery and rounds off corners. Every stroke is smoothed along its length, genuine tight corners are rebuilt, and the result is refitted as real curves, so a plotter draws a clean line rather than a shivering one.
What to feed it
Line art is the sweet spot: sketches, doodles, signatures, coloring-book drawings, mandalas, and logos built from strokes. Solid filled shapes have no meaningful centerline, so a filled silhouette is a job for the cut modes on the main converter. Photographs are the same story: there is no single line through a face.
For handwriting photographed on paper, use the handwriting keepsake converter instead. It flattens shadows, ignores yellowed paper, and scrubs notebook rules before tracing, none of which a plain image trace does.
How to turn an image into a single-line SVG
Regular vectorizers trace around your lines, which makes a pen draw every stroke twice. This traces down the middle of them instead.
Upload your line art
Drop in a PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP or TIFF up to 25 MB. Sketches, doodles, signatures, coloring-book art and logos with clear strokes are what this mode is built for.
Choose the Draw it mode
Draw it is the single-line mode. It skeletonizes your artwork and follows the centerline of every stroke, so an X stays two crossing lines and a letter stays writing instead of a hollow bubble outline.
Check the strokes in the preview
Look for lines that reach all the way to the drawn ends and junctions that meet the way a hand would draw them. Turn Keep lines connected up or down if your artwork is very fine or very heavy.
Download the SVG
The result is open paths, not filled shapes, which is exactly what a pen plotter, foil quill, Cricut pen, or laser in engrave mode wants to follow.
Reorder it for the plotter
Run the file through the plotter SVG optimizer to sort the strokes so the pen stops criss-crossing the page. The artwork is unchanged, only the drawing order is.
Questions, answered
What is a single-line SVG?
It is a file made of open paths that follow the centre of each stroke, so a machine with a pen or a laser draws each line exactly once. A normal traced SVG is filled shapes, so the pen goes around the outside of every line and you get hollow double lines.
Why do normal vectorizers not work for pen plotters?
Auto-tracers like the ones built into most design tools produce outlines because they are built for cutting and printing. Drawn on a plotter, an outline of a 2mm stroke becomes two parallel lines with a gap down the middle instead of one confident pen stroke.
Is the single-line mode free?
The preview is open to everyone with no account, so you can upload artwork and see the traced strokes for free. The clean, watermark-free download comes with Pro ($6 a month or $48 a year), because a plotter would simply draw a watermark too.
What kind of artwork works best?
Line art: sketches, doodles, signatures, coloring-book drawings, and logos made of clear strokes. Solid filled shapes and photographs do not have a meaningful centerline, so use the cut modes for those.
Which machines is this for?
Pen plotters such as AxiDraw, NextDraw and EleksMaker, the Cricut pen, foil quills, laser engravers running in line or engrave mode, and CNC engraving. Anything that draws rather than cuts.
Do the lines reach the ends of my strokes?
Yes. Skeletonizing artwork normally pulls stroke ends back and scrambles junctions, so the tracer regrows each tip to where the pen actually stopped and rebuilds crossings the way a hand would draw them: an X is two straight strokes, a T is a bar plus a stem.
Can I use it for handwriting from a photo?
For handwriting on paper, use the handwriting keepsake converter instead. It adds photo cleanup for shadows, yellowed paper and notebook rules before tracing, which a plain image trace does not do.
Can I get the lines as a DXF for CNC software?
Yes. The download offers DXF R12 alongside SVG, so the same centerlines open directly in Fusion 360, VCarve, LightBurn and other CAM tools without an SVG import step.
Related tools and guides
Cut the wasted pen-up travel before you draw it.
Single-stroke text to sit beside your traced art.
Cut modes too, for vinyl and cardstock.
Photo cleanup built for real writing on paper.
The same centerline idea, applied to any OTF or TTF.
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