I vectorized a raster image with LiveTrace and want to turn it into a line drawing for children to color.
Here is part of the design, which covers the mouth:
Here is the original design as a line drawing (stroke and no fill):
I want a line drawing similar to the above where the paths are simplified, otherwise tiny children will lose patience coloring every small patch.
When I expand the LiveTrace object, each anchor point is specified twice, e.g. once for the white of the teeth and again for the light green of the gums. In the above line drawing, the result is that the outer line looks lighter than the inside lines. As another, in the image below, I moved one of the anchor points on the right and not the other, and it created a vacuum between them:
I want to remove color and deduplicate paths, so I can then use the Object > Path > Simplify
tool. When I run it now, the simplification moves each of the duplicate lines in different ways, so it creates either an overlap or a vacuum. I used an extreme case of 60% accuracy and 10º angle so the result shows:
How can I deduplicate the paths to avoid vacuum and overlap in path simplification?