Yearly archives: 2006


Variable Update

The initial variable width conversion code is up and working in the CVS. The one big problem at the moment is that some of the variable width fonts aren’t reporting their widths properly on some characters, which is causing the image to look a little bit off. I’ll post some more sample pictures (using a good font) after I’ve rewritten a couple of small pieces of code that I know are affecting the output.

Speaking of pictures, I’ve purchased some webspace from Dreamhost which I’ll be using for a gallery of output images from the program (probably using Coppermine). I used an insane deal that came with a free domain name, full shell access, 20Gb+ of space and 1Tb+ of data transfer a month so I won’t have to worry about limits. More on that when I’ve got it all set up properly.


Image to Variable Width ASCII Art Conversions

*** Variable width conversions were added in version 0.6.0, Original post follows: ***

Good news: The idea I had to do variable width ASCII art works.
Bad news: It’s ridiculously slow and totally unworkable. Currently takes around 5 minutes to do a small image.

Edit – Down to about 10 seconds to do the conversion. Still not fast enough but it’s getting there.
Edit2 – Now 0.25 seconds, and I can still optimise the design a lot more.

Just to show I’m not making this up:
First variable width conversion
It’s in Microsoft Sans Serif 8pt, and the aspect ratio isn’t right, but you get the idea.