Hi 

I am really very new to Inkscape and finding my way. The plan is to make paint masks using a Cricut cutter to use on scale models with Inkscape creating the vectorised artwork of the image outline. 

I have scanned an image that is reasonable clear but when I use the trace bitmap with the Colour Quantization it looks really awful. Any help would be much appreciated.

GIF Image to convert

Dire Result

Any help would be much appreciated

The initial image is just too small and has a lot of anti aliasing present.

It's not really possible to get a good result auto tracing this image. 

A better solution would be to try and identify the font being used in the original image.

Thanks for that. In that case I will take a photo that should give a bigger image to scan. I have the font on my pc but it does not appear in Inkscape. 

Will 

Scimitarf1

I have the font on my pc but it does not appear in Inkscape. 

A search of this forum has many conversations on fonts not appearing, particularly on Windows machines. There is probably a solution for your system.

Yea, getting the proper font to work would be your best bet. But it looks like those are supposed to all be straight lines, correct?

If so, even the wonky tracing should be easy enough to fix. You should be able to go into the nodes tool and just select the nodes along an area that should be straight, and then use the button that says 'Make selected segments lines.'