[bambax]

Excellent project, congrats!

About the cleaning up phase: the author cleaned up the bitmaps before the vectorizing stage, and that included separating lines.

In my experience it's a little bit easier to clean the vectorized results by removing unwanted points, because those are easier to see than line connections that may or may not pose a problem later. (But to each their own.)

[stankot]

Actually that's my usual approach, but you should see the vector output from these. I tried doing it and than went back to cleaning up the raster images.