Coding schemes for the quantization of line drawings that outperform basic chain codes are investigated. First, subpixel accuracy reconstruction is obtained by a simple linear filtering of the chain code points, which achieves a factor-of-three to-four reduction in average reconstruction distortion for smooth curves. Second, the basic chain encoding schemes are generalized to a multipath-tree-searched encoding scheme. A variation of the (M,L)-algorithm is used to maintain M contending chain code paths in storage and choose the best path from these. Over a wide variety of source curves, tree-searched chain coding results in nearly an order of magnitude reduction in average reconstruction distortion over smoother chain codes. The performance improvement for curves is obtained with only a slight increase in bit rate over basic chain codes.>