BTAC

Bitmap To ASCII Converter (cleverly abbreviated as BTAC) is an experimental ASCII Art generator and was written for pretty much no good reason at all. Although the conversion algorithm was very computationally expensive (I didn't know/care how screwed up O(n³) complexity was at the time), the results are interesting.

I wrote this thing in C++ back in high school while developing font and bitmap processing libraries for MegaQuest. The goal of this application was to take a bitmap image (either 8 or 24 bit) and convert it to colored ASCII which would be output to HTML. The program used one of two monospace rasterized fonts (terminal 8pt and terminal 10pt) to find a best-fit symbol for each block of equal dimensions on the bitmap; this allowed for the preservation of a fair amount of detail, especially around edges. BTAC also featured many different adjustable parameters to tweak the conversion process on a per-image basis.

Downloads

• Sample HTML (view in Internet Explorer)

Images

A butterfly...

A person...

A lilly...