Hey there sweets, thanks for your help!

I've been desperately trying to find my way through inkscape bitmaptracing in order to reproduce some line-art-tattoo-sketches for to send over to an axidraw pen plotter i just built. 

Sadly it doesn't quite do what i want and i seem to be to noob about the technical side of it to help myself.

MY PROBLEM IS: 
I want to reproduce a pdf sketch AS SEEN, so i'd love to have fewest possible modification to it, as the ductus, the "style" of the line-art is really important to my customers, and it quickly becomes "something else" when using the "trace bitmap" tool.
I'll attach 3 photos, black/White being the original painting and then the 2 options that have worked best, but not satisfying yet:

The best 2 options i found so far is (both single-scan)
a) using the brightness detector (first option). Which traces the sketch perfectly, only that it (of course) gives out double-lines (instead of 1 original line) as it detects the "lines" as "surfaces" and the draws vectorlines around the edges i guess. (see "a")

b) using the line-trace. This had got the right idea, but (of course) struggled with the areas where multiple lines in the original sketch morphed into a black surface.

So what (i guess) i might need would be some tool somewhere in the www that functions like "trace bitmap line trace" more or less, but lets me determine a certain "width of line" in mm or pixels, so that i can tell the machine how thick the lines of my original drawing are, and it converts those into an svg, that, when i give the pen-plotter a 2mm-size pen, it would reproduce the painting more or less exact! 

Please, anyone who solves this problem saves himself some big karma and anyone who manages to look into it deep and makes it posswible for me to pen-plotter-copy all my tattoo and fineline pdf's with a single trick for to use each time; I'd b willing to paypal some 50 eur or whatever.
You see, I'm desperate here :D

Thanks guys and gals
xx

 

Hard nut methinks. Centreline tracing isn't usable with this kind of drawing and I'm not sure if "pen-plotting" works with Color filled shapes.

Certainly it is a challenge with the current tracing options and toolset. 

But there are definitely ways to continue the journey. 

As mentioned above, you need to differentiate between what is  supposed to be a single stroke and what is a cluster of strokes  filling up an area. 

For that, you need to have two separate images to start the tracing. One holding the drawing with everything within the perimeter of  a supposed single stroke, and one that excludes it. 

 Tried these steps:

use the trace bitmap with single scan/brightness cutoff first, then add a white stroke to it the width of the stroke in the raster image. 

Group that with a white filled rectangle, and use that group to mask the original raster image. 

Then run centerline tracing on that.

For the filled parts, the regular single scan is a good  starting point. 

You need to inset/dynamic offset it several times atop eachother/run the right gcodetool  extension. 

This turns out to have many "bugs" or rather imperfections. When the offsetting is larger than the width of the object, it won't vanish but create extra paths.

So as an alternative solution tried similar method with the centerline tracing. Increase a white stroke over the black filled area each time, 

create a raster copy and trace that. 

Needs some testing and the largest raster image you can get/try out ways blowing it up a few times to see if it has an effect on the tracing 

(it does so there is definitely ways to experiment with).

Attaching a screenshot of my first test run.

Wow, thanks so much for the help already, will try!

Only problem is im kind of a noob on the terms so i got a few understanding-questions:
1.
"use the trace bitmap with single scan/brightness cutoff first, then add a white stroke to it the width of the stroke in the raster image. "
What do you mean by "add a white stroke" and how do i do that. 
 

2. "Group that with a white filled rectangle, and use that group to mask the original raster image."
no understanding here. How do i create a white filled rectangle? How do i group it to the white stroke? What do you mean by "mask the original raster image"?

3. "You need to inset/dynamic offset it several times atop eachother/run the right gcodetool  extension."
Sadly, i do not quite get this neither. Can you help a dummy out?

Sorry, im trying hard googling and chatgpt-ing my way of understanding but  keep having some issues... 
Would be glad if you could break it down into simple steps like as if you were to explain it to your father whose using the inkscape the first time..
Thanks!!
 

You're trying to run before you can walk. For 1 and 2, I suggest reading through the tutorials [Help > Tutorials > Inkscape: Basic] and [Help > Tutorials > Inkscape: Tracing] and the others. These will explain groups, fill and stroke, offset, mask, etc. Then you can tackle item 3.

Inkscape can't directly control plotters, laser cutters, engravers and milling machines so drawings must be translated from SVG to GCODE. This is a text file that instructs your machine how to move tools around the workpiece. There are some free Inkscape extensions that do this and several commercial applications are available. Sorry to say, I don't know enough to recommend one.

@Paddy_CAD If it is an AxiDraw, then the AxiDraw extensions for Inkscape do manage the plotting directly, without any step of G-code conversion.

@oskay Thanks for the clarification. I guess I'm winging it. I have no practical experience here.