6. ASCII Text Art

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6. ASCII Text Art

Create a text with an ASCII Art appearance

A very popular form of ASCII art is to create text from the actual characters themselves. With this feature you can create any text of any shape of any font at almost any size. The only limitation is the number of characters: 255. As demonstrated in the example below, a text is created from characters. The typeface of the text 'Text' is called the 'macro font', the 'micro font' is the typeface of the small characters. When Textaizer starts, all available fonts of Windows are loaded in the two pull-down boxes.

Text Art settings

Type any text in the box 'Text for ASCII art transformation'. The result is immediately seen in the preview window. The text can be tuned and changed with the following controls:

Use own characters to build the ASCII Art text from its own characters, or use the preset key character. The preset key character is shown in the green box. Any key can be used, the default character is 'x'.
There are two additional type faces: bold and italic.
When the box ASCII view is ticked the line distance is matched with HTML or text files (appr. 1.5 times the normal line distance).
The font sizes for both the macro and the micro font can be set. The micro font is what you finally see in the browser or as text file in Notepad. The macro font is the typeface of the word itself. Two important things to know:
- Make sure when showing the text result in a web browser that the micro font is available
- when showing the text as a text file (e.g. Notepad), make sure that the micro font is mono-spaced to avoid that kerning of the characters completely destroys the effect. A mono-spaced font has characters with the same width. The example below shows the effect of mono-spaced (e.g Courier New) and kerning fonts (e.g. Arial)

x xxx xxx    xxx    x xxx     xxx
xx   xx   x x   x   xx   x   x   x
x    x    x x     x x    x x     x
x    x    x x     x x    x x     x
x    x    x x     x x    x x     x
x    x    x x   x   x    x   x   x
x    x    x   xxx    x    x    xxx

x xxx xxx    xxx    x xxx     xxx
xx   xx   x x   x   xx   x   x   x
x    x    x x     x x    x x     x
x    x    x x     x x    x x     x
x    x    x x     x x    x x     x
x    x    x x   x   x    x   x   x
x    x    x   xxx    x    x    xxx

With the two buttons the result can be previewed as a text file ('Open in Notepad') or in the default browser as HTML ('Open in browser').

"Can't allocate the DIB handle"

This is an error message indicating that the size of the generated bitmap can not be managed in the available RAM of the computer. The RAM usage is indicated in the left bottom corner (e.g. 345 Mb / 2048 MB). The first number is the amount of memory that is used by Textaizer Pro, the other is the available free RAM that is available for applications. In general when the RAM usage reaches 450 MB, the danger zone has been entered. After this error message the application needs to be closed and restarted. To avoid this error message carefully select the micro and macro font sizes. Both have a profound effect on the RAM usage.

Tip: another ASCII art text generator

A very good (simple text) ASCII art generator is found here: http://www.network-science.de/ascii/. An example of one of the more than 140 typefaces:

                                     .__          
  ____ ___  ________    _____ ______ |  |   ____  
_/ __ \\  \/  /\__  \  /     \\____ \|  | _/ __ \ 
\  ___/ >    <  / __ \|  Y Y  \  |_> >  |_\  ___/ 
 \___  >__/\_ \(____  /__|_|  /   __/|____/\___  >
     \/      \/     \/      \/|__|             \/