Hydrographische Nachrichten 25, 16–21. issn: 0934-7747 (Juni 2008). Actually, the problem of vectorizing paper maps comes up, when the cartographer has to convert scanned paper maps or satellite imageries in vector format. This issue is of topical interest, because there are both the satellite images and bathymetric (or topographic) maps which are still largely pa- per-based and therefore uneditable in any digital system. Bitmap to vector converting is a difficult, highly time-consuming and

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... nical task. The ideal instrument for quick and perfect digitizing of raster images to vector ones (so called R2V vectorizing software) does not exist though for the ma- chine doesn't understand the geomorphological features and the character of the sea floor relief. That's why the digitizing routine requires a large share of manual labour, a lot of time and patience in several trial sessions, which will necessarily contain errors to finally find out the best parameters of procedure to make a reality of our cartographic wishes. Especially difficult and tedious is to digitize large-scaled bathymetric maps with very complicated relief and geomorphological features. And it's not to mention that nowadays paper-based maps without digital counterpart lose their value, yet making those cost a lot of money for updating and changing the thematic information on maps. At the same time, we can't reject the paper-based maps only because they are paper-based. A lot of thematic maps are really rare, very necessary or just are to be used in mapping, e. g. geologic or tectonic maps, since their thematic information may remain the same for centuries. So it's clear, that using of the digitizing tools in mapping and finding out the optimal instrument for the bathymetrical purposes are questions of great actuality and importance. In this article the experience of our work with AutoTrace is presented – a vectorizer toolkit, that is chosen among others thanks to its effectiveness and open source distribution.