How do I get potrace commands out of inkscape?

Question

I can get the .pnm ⇾ .svg results I want using the Trace Bitmap tool in the Inkscape GUI. If I understand it correctly, that tool is just a front end to Potrace. Is there a way to see what Inkscape is telling Potrace such that I can recreate the steps using the Potrace CLI? (I want to trace a bunch of .pnm's, but it sounds like Inkscape's CLI can't do tracing)

I'm on a Mac which maybe cuts out the Potracegui solution.

The specific setup I have in Inkscape is:

• Multicolor
• Colors Detection mode
• 4 scans
• Smooth enabled
• Stack enabled
• Remove background enabled
• Speckles disable
• Smooth corners set to 1.00
• Optimize set to 0.200

Answer 1

Billy's linked question was helpful, but unfortunately Potrace only does black and white tracing and I couldn't use the windows binary provided. Instead, I found this post on the Inkscape forum that linked to this github repo. I was eventually able to get it up and running with a few caveats:

1. You need a version of Python at least 3.2 to get color_trace to run, but it can't be past 3.7 since "multiprocessing.Process itself is not picklable as of Python 3.7". I eventually went with Python 3.6.15
2. Inkscape seemed to handle tracing transparent backgrounds okay, but color_trace won't AFAICT. I used mogrify -background white -alpha remove -alpha off *.png from here to set all the backgrounds to white before tracing.
3. After that python color_trace_multi.py -i source/*.png -d output/ -c 5 -s -bg gave me pretty much what I had in Inkscape at scale.