Hi y'all!

First post. Apologies if the answer to this I am sure noobish question is provided every other day, but if it is my google fu has not been strong enough to locate it.

My problem. I have a bitmap that I wish to vectorize using the "Trace Bitmap" tool, and it works great! Having tweaked the options around a bit I've found something that produces exactly the result I want... save one little thing. My bitmap contains a fair amount of white in the outline of a text, and I want to include this outline in the vector, however, I also want the actual background of the bitmap gone, and replaced with lovely transparency. Checking "Trace Bitmap"'s "Remove Background" option works fine as far as removing the background color goes, only it also removes all white from the vector entirely, including my outlines! I've tried changing both Inkscape's native document background color, and the actual background of my bitmap, to some other random color (pink, say), in the vain hope that Inkscape would then recognize and remove pink as the background color, leaving the white still intact, but It does not. Inkscape appears hellbent to force me to choose between either including a white background canvas in the vector, or have both the background and my outlines replaced with transparency, neither of which conforms to my designs.

This bugs me to no end. Can has halp, pl0x?

Thank you!

A suggestion:
Instead of changing the background of your bitmap to pink, why not change it to transparent? Then trace the bitmap. Does this work?

Ah, no. Sorry. Tried that first, of course. The tracer identifies white and transparency, and also does so even if the transparency technically is black, or whatever. I have established a work-around in setting the outline-color to an off-white bone color instead of #FFFFFF-white, which works as intended -- and I guess for my purposes as well -- but I also cannot imagine that it shouldn't be possible to have the tracer identify both transparency and white proper as separate?