I'm trying to trace some calligraphy, and I can't seem to get the edges smooth. I'm selecting Colors, Smooth, and Remove background. The result gets all the jagged edges from the pen strokes. I've tried a linked offset, simplify path, but those don't seem to work either. What I really need is just less detail. Seems like that should be possible.

Is it possible that your bitmap might be too low resolution to get a smooth trace from? Why not load the picture to the forum and see if we can tell you what your best option might be

Usually the opposite of druban's suggestion can help in the case of too much detail: use a smaller version of the bitmap that you want to trace.

I second the suggestion to share the file, that'll make it easier to suggest other solutions.

um... so I guess I need help now on uploading images. My original is 3 MB, and I got the file too large error. So I shrank it down to 800 KB, and It's still too large. How can you share files if that's too large?

use an image hoster, like imgur.com or imgh.us