Graphical Montage Tools from Text or Other Graphics? 10
Eli asks: "Ages ago on Slashdot there was a post of a company in England who would take a picture you sent them and they would return it to you as a poster with every pixel in the original represented with a greyscale character. It was nifty, but it cost money. Then a few days later, someone posted a Gimp Script-Fu that did the same thing, for free, in full color, with any user supplied text file. I used this for ages but have since lost the script. Do any of you old skewl dotters happen to have this in an archive somewhere? Has anyone made improvements to it? It's not in the /. archives. I'm sure it was pre-Andover days."
And this related question from Panu Hällfors, which is asking more for a specific website than a software tool, but I figure there is a software tool behind there somewhere: "Some time ago there was this project of making a huge image montage in which small Linux-related images would make up a picture of Tux. I used to check out the preview versions every now and then and even submit a few pictures myself. But now! Where's the site? What has happened?
Neither their site nor their email account (linux@remotepoint.com) seems to exists anymore. Does anyone know who were working on the project and where they are now? I'd like to see the project go on, if possible."
So I'm sure there is software out there for creating an image out of specified text or even other images. What packages are out there? Which ones do you use?
Gray Scale Mosaic (Score:3)
Re:Photo- and text-mosaics (Score:2)
Of course, you need that database of images, but what else are 100,001 pieces of clipart CDs good for?
Printer Art - ASCII Art (Score:1)
In the computer world, in the 1960s the most widely available output device was a "line printer". This was a printer which printed up to 132 characters on each line of 11x17 paper. The printer could be told to stay on the same line, so text could be printer over other previously printed text. There were a large number of images developed to be printed out, including ones which were printed in several columns which had to be joined side-to-side (such as an image of a jet flying over the Golden Gate bridge). Both simple printing and overprinting were used. Here [napanet.net] is an example circa 1973; it was such a popular technique that even self-portraits were done with it.
There were programs available for creating "printer art". You'd give the program a two-dimensional matrix of integers with the gray scale value desired for each pixel. The programs simply translated the gray scale numbers to the character (or characters) used for the nearest shade of gray. The programs were particularly convenient if you were one of the few people with some sort of image scanning device.
When ASCII became popular, with Teletypes and 72-80 character timesharing terminals becoming common, the same technology was used there. Some artists preferred to (or didn't know about the programs) manually create the art with text editors (or tools like a 1987 program for creating printer art [simtel.net]). Some of the same images appeared on terminals.
Obviously, text characters were used simply for their gray-scale pixel value. The same technology can be used for images, by selecting component images based on brightness and color values.
There are now many ASCII Art sites on the Web. This Conversion Programs [geocities.com] information is from this ASCII Art FAQ [geocities.com]. An online example of a conversion program is GIF2TXT [degraeve.com], which converts any online image -- try giving it that Slashdot logo at the upper left of this page. If you don't get enough ASCII Art links [geocities.com] here, try the ASCII Art WebRing [angelfire.com].
545studios.com had PixelTransformer (Score:2)
Photo- and text-mosaics (Score:2)
The method of combining photos into a mosaic, like every other good idea on the planet, is patented [164.195.100.11]. Try pbmtoascii [sourceforge.net] for textual mosaics.
FIGlet fonts and Email Effects software (Score:1)
"FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text".
It appears to be available on multiple platforms with source code.
And, if you've got a Mac or Windows machines handy, you can try out Email Effects [sigsoftware.com] from Sig Software [sigsoftware.com].
This software is more like an ASCII-based Paint Shop Pro, etc. It can also import graphics files and convert them into ASCII drawings.
Thinkgeek (Score:2)
Doh! (Score:1)
Some starting points... (Score:2)
Re:Photo- and text-mosaics (Score:1)
It is a GIMP plugin which creates a database out of a large number of pictures. You then run the filter over the source image.
It was really early code so I suspect that Metapixel may be better.
Get it from my site: Here [silicontrip.org]