Why is it called Potrace, and how is it pronounced?
My first name for this program was “pbm2eps”, which was very lame and also inaccurate, because both the input and output file formats were likely to evolve over time. So I started looking for a cooler name. Since this program does tracing, I wanted a name with the word “trace” in it. I did a Google seach for each combination “atrace”…”ztrace” of a single letter plus “trace”. Believe it or check for yourself: every single one of them was already taken by some other software! Most of them were something boring, like a function in some obscure statistics package written in Fortran. If I remember correctly, the only exception was “ytrace”, which brought up a foreign language porn site called “sexo con perros”. I am not sure what “ytrace” might mean in some foreign language, but I have a pretty good idea what “sexo con perros” means, and so I didn’t want to take the risk of giving this name to my program. So I started looking for 2-letter combinations. It so happens that “potrace” didn’t
