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Deviousness `ChewedKandi has certainly gone out of her way to keep the vector community on the right path. Always making sure that her talents are infinitely scalable, Sharon has put her bezier curves to excellent use, and firmly anchored herself as an inspirational leader. We're absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for June 2013 to `ChewedKandi. Congratulations, Sharon! Read More
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Sta.sh
Another thing you can do to clean up the file is select parts of the document (or all, but it might be slow) and use the shape builder tool to merge similar shapes back together, and then keep/delete them.
You can then go in when you are done with the pencil tool and draw/smooth lines. With the new version of trace coming out soon with CS6, this type of thing should be much easier to do.
Obviously there are things you can do to enhance the trace which requires you to use your brain, as with using any quality software. This tutorial is only the most basic method to introduce people to using the method. If you want a 1 click solution,
If you want more control, just rasterize at a higher resolution, and apply blur filters to force smoother lines, or resize it smaller to make the image simple to get even more simpler lines. You can also, increase the minimum area to further reduce unwanted anchor points.
And again, you can prepare the trace object in an image manipulation program by deleting unwanted areas, converting to contrast/bw, or adding contour.
Even in vector magic, you have to know what you are doing to produce something decent without hundreds of useless paths. I feel illustrator's trace is a better option, it's faster, and it's easier to control, but use what you are comfortable with.
You will have to edit the result anyways, so keep this in mind.
You can also tell it to create a trace with only strokes, and no fills, which may be much better for line art (I believe default is fills).
Remember that live trace will not always work for everything, and you are right, if the project only has a few strokes, it may be simpler to just redraw it.