Thanks for the responses. I appreciate the help. Usually, tracing refers to vectorization of raster image. Sorry for the confusion. Tracing to me just meant placing an image on a background layer, then drawing over it before deleting. I would otherwise recommend doing the tracing "by hand"...

Newby question. How suitable would Inkscape be in the creation of map graphics for a travel guide? The work entails taking a portion of existing maps that were scanned and saved as jpegs or gifs, usually in black and white, then manually tracing the portions of the map desired and adding simple line...