Image to Text Converters: Revisiting the Old School Through ASCII Art

I was browsing through a couple of Web sites earlier to check for software updates when suddenly, a word struck me- ASCII. ASCII is simply a character encoding based on the English alphabet. When graphical representations are made out of it, ASCII art is produced. I remembered a film I watched a year ago entitled, BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott Sadofsky. It’s an 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the BBS and there was a portion where the ANSI Art Scene was featured. I realized back then that computer graphics became widespread not when the first version of Photoshop or CorelDraw arrived, but during the 1970’s, when telegraphers had lesser workload (specifically on Christmas day). They would pass ASCII art to their fellow telegraphers as a form of leisure. Nowadays, we rarely see ASCII art except in text files associated with cracks and warez groups.

Would you believe that the two images I’ve shown so far are made of ANSI characters? It would have been easier to draw them in Photoshop, but creating them out of ANSI would perhaps take a lot of time and effort. They really do. In fact, these ANSI artists spend weeks to finish one masterpiece. They would then release their artwork with the help of their respective groups. Two of those groups featured in the BBS Documentary were ACiD and iCE. These rival groups would release monthly archives through their so-called art packs and then let the audience decide which artwork is the best and to which group it belongs. It was all for the sake of competition and fun.

Oh, those days should have been amusing. The BBSes, costly phone bills, 300 baud modems, Altairs, Commodores, Ataris, Apple II’s, IBM’s, and trolls were all part of the good old days. I just wish I was a part of it (I was a toddler back then). Anyway, it should be enough to be able to appreciate the days before the World Wide Web came to shape.

Now, let’s experience how computer graphic is created in those days. There are several ASCII art generators and text-image converters online. The results won’t be as attractive as the images posted above, but hey, it’s still ASCII art. Here are a few notable Web sites:

TEXT-IMAGE.com

Generate cool text-images from almost any picture you have on your computer.

ASCII Art Generator @ Glassgiant.com

Converts your picture to ASCII text art - a jumble of letters, numbers and symbols that do not appear to have any significance until you step back and look at the whole picture. Check out the Mona Lisa ASCII art sample.

ASCII Art - Image to Ascii, Text to Ascii

 

And here’s a free (and offline) ASCII generator for Windows. ASCII Generator dotNET needs .NET framework of 2.0 or higher in order to work.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 22:45 and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.