ImageToText

The computer isn't just a multifunctional tool to help earn a living or perform complex tasks. On the contrary, it's also a method of creating art through its powerful processing capabilities, some of which derived from programming. In this regard, ImageToText helps you generate ASCII art out of pictures of various formats.

Once the application is deployed on your computer, and this only takes a little while, you can launch it to see what it's all about. The visual design is highly intuitive, structured in three sections, or steps, each with corresponding details you can modify and adjust to import, process, and export the new picture.

Needless to say that main input needs to be under the form of a picture, which can be under formats like JPG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIF, TIFF, ICO, EMF, and WMF, which is quite the diversity. The same formats are available if you choose to generate a picture instead of text, but this doesn't mean the application can be used as a convertor. Adding pictures is also possible through a drag and drop operation.

The second steps is where you dictate the output style. Here, you select from either text or image output, font name, color, background color, letters per row, style, second style, character size, and custom RGB values for color adjustment. Not all characters in the selected font are used, but you can manually add characters in the third step, which can be set to keep height ratio intact.

Hitting the "convert" button generates the corresponding ASCII image in either text or image mode. Text lets you save as a TXT and RTF files, while image uses one of the aforementioned formats. On the bright side of things, there's also a batch mode which functions in a similar manner, but makes it possible to process multiple pictures from a custom location.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that ImageToText is sure to come in handy for transforming neat landscapes or portraits into ASCII art. A decent variety of picture formats are supported, while customization lets you choose your own characters and colors to use in the process.