http://www.shamrockboats.com/newpages/newimages/logos/ShamrockFontLogo.jpg

Need to cut this for a friends boat not even real sure how to clean up the .bmp.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance

As far as that logo is concerned I would say it is a custom letterstyle too. Just as an illustration of how I tackle something like that here is a partly done manual "trace" I did in about 6 or 7 minutes.

What I did was import the bitmap into CorelDraw (Which is basically the same type of program as Illustrator).

I then chose a font that was somewhat similar in appearance, in this case Square Bold, typed it over top of the bitmap, assigned no fill and a yellow pen outline (for purposes of showing this method, in reality I did the work in wireframe view) and then stretched it to fit as closely as possible. I then converted the text into an editible graphic. (Sorry I don't know the actual term in Illustrator). At this point I just moved the nodes around to reshape the lelters to align with the letters in the bitmap.

As a side note. I use Type 1 fonts instead of TTF fonts, because they have far fewer nodes to deal with. In this case the letter "o" only had only 16 nodes wheas the TTF equivalent would have had at least 32 nodes.

This type of manipulation of nodes is one of the most basic skills that needs to be learned when doing vinyl lettering and not having original vector artwork to work with (Which is about 80% of the time! LOL)

Good luck and have fun. By the way, as with most explanations it tokk longer to type this message than it did to manipulate the last 4 letters of the word.

------------------
--------------------------------------------------
"A wise man once said that, or was it a wise guy?"