The characteristics, properties and generative sequences of line tracking algorithms for incremental devices are summarised and the mappings from one into the other are discussed. Extensions to the basic algorithms to exploit a greater variety of possible operations in the basic hardware set of the device and also to cater for various types of curve are summarised. A new method of partitioning based upon derived code sequences and code patterns is presented and is shown to lead to significant code sequence compression (more than 40%) in the majority of cases, and more importantly a significant overall reduction of between 20% and 43% in the total central processor usage. Algorithm for encoding the sequences are presented.