Convert VTF to IGS

Technical note

VTF to IGS: what carries over and what does not

VTF is made of pixels and IGS stores geometry, so the conversion traces the image into real lines, arcs and polylines. The result is editable in CAD: entities can be selected, snapped to and measured, rather than a bitmap wrapped inside a IGS container, which is what a viewer or a lightweight converter usually produces. It is still derived geometry, so expect contours rather than a structured drawing. Dimensions, blocks and meaningful layer names were never in the VTF to begin with. How good the result is depends almost entirely on the VTF going in. Clean line art, a logo or a drawing scanned at 300 dpi or more traces into geometry you can work with. A photograph does not: continuous tone has no contours to follow, so tracing it produces thousands of tiny shapes and a file nobody can edit. Scan or export at the highest resolution available, and prefer a lossless original, because compression artefacts along an edge become ripples in the traced path.