idbImage2Text

Art is rather difficult to define, since everyone appreciates creativity differently. With the rise of computer tools, digital art quickly came to power, and there are a lot of forms around this practice. For instance, regular images can be drawn with characters of all kinds, and you can perform this operation with idbImage2Text.

Convert a decent variety of image formats

On the bright side of things, the application is portable, so you can even deploy it on a thumb drive to be used on other computers than your own. Registry entries are not altered in the process, which means the health status of the target PC remains intact. However, you need to be sure that .NET Framework is on the computer you use.
The interface is split into a couple of sections, one of which displays the loaded image up for conversion, while the other is the text representation. You only get to process one picture at a time, which can be added through a drag and drop operation or the browse dialog. It’s possible to load images under formats like JPG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, ICO, EMF, and WMF.

Select the font set and parameters for conversion

As you figured out by now, the application is basically a picture to ASCII converter. Before conversion, you get the chance to select the font to be used in the process, as well as attributes, like size, strikeout, underline, including color. However, you can’t set the exact set of characters to be used, so you might want to experiment with a few fonts.
The result is generated in little time, and you can even edit the ASCII image. Unfortunately, the application first converts the input to black and white, which can result in a rather poor representation of the original. When it comes to saving, you need to manually copy the ASCII code and save it to a document.

On an ending note

All in all, idbImage2Text is a fun tool to use which can convert just about any kind of picture to ASCII code representation. The process doesn’t require a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, there are a few shortcomings, such as the black and white conversion, or the lack of a character filter.