ASCGEN dotNET Tutorial 1 – Creating an ASCII image
(Document v3.0, using Ascgen dotNET 0.9.7(pre), updated 20080402)
In the first in a series of tutorials on how to use the ASCGEN dotNET, I show you how to convert an image to a high quality fixed width text image with just a few simple steps and very little effort.
We will be going from this
to 
About the current version
First, a note to people still downloading the previous version: STOP IT. That is what happens when you link directly to a file instead of the download page.
Things I forgot to mention:
- The save as 8-bit colour output is currently using the inbuilt gif compression to reduce it down to <256 colours. It isn’t very good at it, so the output will be much better if I ever get around to writing my own octree quantization code (or find some gpl code to do it).
- To get the best results, check the invert output button so it has white text on black, then “save as colour text”, and save as 8-bit XHTML. I’ve been meaning to write some tutorials for a long time.
- If you want to save it as an image, to print or whatever, I would suggest the Save As Image plugin for firefox. Then just load the html into firefox and you rightclick to save the page as a png.
Beta 7.0 Released – COLOR OUTPUT
Changes in this version:
Added “Save as Colour Text” to output as html and rtf files with the Color information added
Added menu links to the report a bug and feature request pages
Changed batch conversion form from contextmenus to contextmenustrips
Added saving as html files
Now don’t say I don’t do anything for you people.