Practical guide

Let Kurviq choose the recipe

One flag that classifies the source and applies the matching recipe, and one that shows its work.

Problem

Every recipe on this site is a measured answer to a specific kind of source. Choosing between them means knowing what you are looking at, and the cost of guessing wrong is a mediocre trace. --auto makes that choice from the image itself.

Command

Terminal

npx kurviq --input in.png --output out.svg --auto --explain

Before and after

Barcode, small outline icon, raster input

Barcode, small outline icon, traced SVG output

PNG SVG

PNG: 88.6 KB SVG: 2.4 KB

Barcode, small outline icon

Narrow bars and soft-alpha edges on a compact source.

Over 47 test images, --auto improved 33 and left 7 unchanged, reducing mean structural distance by 37%. Seven regressed slightly: it is a heuristic, not an oracle, which is exactly why --explain exists.

Workflow

1. Run it and read the explanation

--explain prints the class, the reasons, and the resolved flags to stderr, so redirecting stdout to a file still works.

2. Pin the flags

The printed flags reproduce the run byte for byte. Once you are happy with a source type, copy them into your build and drop --auto, which then costs you nothing at build time.

3. Override anything

Explicitly supplied options always beat the chosen recipe, so --auto is a starting point rather than a decision you have to undo.

Flag reference

Flag	Value	Why it is here
`--auto`	bare	Classify the source and apply a matching recipe.
`--explain`	bare	Print the class, reasons and resolved flags to stderr.

Watch for this: --auto never enables a document pass such as --consolidate or --structure: those change the shape of the document, which is your intent rather than a property of the image. It also will not downscale for you, because that trades fidelity for file size; when a source is large it says so instead.

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