ASCII art is a cleaver way of using text to represent one or many pixels of an image. It only works with certain font types because it requires each letter in the alphabet to take the same amount of space. ASCII art has been around even prior to modern computer.
How can I say that with confidence … well that’s what I learned in school. In 9th grade I took a typing class using IBM’s word processor and as we learned how to type, we spent an entire month doing ASCII art. I suppose the point was for us to get used to the word processor in some what entertaining approach. Enough of that, I am sure many of you have seen the ASCII art often back in UNIX or dos shell only days.
On Thursday June 22nd 2006 my coworker Max Fortun showing off a text representation of a animation feed of “Football” aka “soccer”. Which is the inspiration to this blog entry. To read more go to http://www.ascii-wm.net. Or to see it in action open a command prompt and type “telnet diego.ascii-wm.net 2006″ and you can watch the football / soccer.
If you find the concept entertaining, then there is much more in the world of ASCII art. If you ever want to convert images on your machine. Then check out this j2ee based program called “JASCIIART”. Basically it’s a program which converts your images into HTML, text, or other out put with principal of ASCII art. To read more on “JASCIIART” go to -> http://reactor.reality-protocol.de/main.php?page=jasciiart.
You may have seen some people including a little ASCII art instead of their names as plain text, in email signatures or at the start of telnet session and etc. To convert text into ASCII art check out this web based application which converts regular text in to ASCII art -> http://www.network-science.de/ascii/. On the site you can convert your name or some other label into many different ASCII art based fonts.
I find to be most entertaining and useful is a site called glassgiant.com. Basically they have online image to ASCII converter powered by PHP. You can put in any image url and watch it formatted in plain text. I recommend you check it out -> http://www.network-science.de/ascii/ and use any image from the web or your computer. To demonstrate the point you can also check some samples -> http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/ascii.php?sample=mona
Want ASCII art in color then check this tool from text-image.com -> http://www.text-image.com/convert/ascii.html. It converts your graphic into text and preserves colors. To see what I mean check out this sample -> http://www.text-image.com/samples/face.html
ASCII art is not limited to just flat images, check out this animation of star wars -> http://www.asciimation.co.nz/. Want to convert a video of your own into ASCII art, then check out -> http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/
In conclusion, I find this subject entertaining and some what related to my earlier post about SIFR, because its interesting that some people create art of text and some create text of art.
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