I am trying to use CurveFitter on a set of contour lines but am not getting useful results. As you can see some of the lines overlap, even after a very light processing. How can this be avoided? I tried both settings of Preserve boundries, but that did not make much difference.
You have to play with the parameters a little more.
Precision defines the maximum deviation allowed between the input and the output.
Preserve Shared Boundaries is used on area features only.
My favorite transformer for generalizing contour lines is the Generalizer set to NURBfit, so try this one to.
Also, by the looks of it, your contours were overlaping before the CorveFitter.
@aron CurveFitter doesn't have a constraint algorithm to prevent overlaps. As @caracadrian suggests, you can try tweaking the (many) CurveFitter parameters.
You could try the SherbendGeneralizer. It doesn't fit curves but it will generalize your contours preserving the spatial relationships. Perhaps a combination of the two will give you the results you need.