There are three control groups for text mosaic creation: the 'Text mosaic settings', the 'Text mosaic options' and the 'Circle settings'.

The Text mosaic settings

• (Bitmap) size multiplier increases the size of the resulting bitmap. The maximum value is 16x, the minimum 0.5x. For instance when a bitmap has 89x46 characters and is 1.5 Mb in size, a multiplier value of 2.0x will increase the size to 178x92, and a size of 5.5Mb 9 (so: the end result becomes 4x the size). With increasing sizes, the calculation time increases accordingly. On slow systems, text mosaic creation may then take tens of seconds.
• Font size sets the size of the font. The font typeface is defined in the 'Tools' tab ('Font settings'). When the font size is changed, the 'Line distance' setting follows the font size, multiplied by 1.6 (to create sufficient visible space between lines). The coloured 'LED' to the right of the font-size box indicates the quality of the print when printed on A4 or letter paper. Green means that the text is well readable, yellow is a danger zone, and red is not recommended.
• Line distance sets the distance between two lines of text measured in font size points. When changing the font size, this value follows, but it can be changed separately while keeping the font size. 
• (Size) matching engines: there are three font size engines. Each engine has a different way to modify/adapt the size for each character. These engines work closely together by a colour determining method, indicated in the control box for 'text mosaic options'.
  • 'Luminance' = the font size follows a predetermined formula to increase (or decrease) size with increasing (or decreasing) luminance of the average colour of that part of the picture on which the character will be put.
  • 'Dynamic' = the font changes with the available white space that this character can possibly use, and can therefore increase with increasing available space. The resulting text appears very dynamic, with the smallest character size as the set font size. This way a better coverage is achieved and the effect helps to cover 'holes' or 'spots' in the result.
  • 'Fixed' = the font size does not change and is equal for all characters of the final text mosaic.
  • 'Density mask' = the font size is determined by a grey-scale bitmap. More information is provided in the special features chapter.
• Chaoticness determines to what degree the character position is randomized (within a predefined boundary). The character is placed very close to the intended position, and can vary as much as its own size.
• Dynamics determines the degree of the effect of the 'chaotic' size engine. A high value of dynamics will try to fully use the empty space of a character, while a low value will almost place the character as the 'fixed' size engine. 

The text mosaic options

• Font change is the probability that a font will change per word or per character. A value of 0 assures no font change whatsoever.
• When Dynamic words is checked the font will change per word rather then per character. The default is per character.
• When Keep words is selected, all words are kept as a whole, and not truncated at the end of a horizontal line.
• The colour match engine determines how the colour is derived form the picture. This control is a selector. From left to right: colours from the source picture; black and white (emboss effect); and blend with the picture. In the last case a character may have different colours, while with the first engine each character has only one colour depending on the corresponding position of the source file. In the picture below the differences are shown, e.g. look at the colour(s) of the letter 'n' (in the word 'Woman', 2nd line, 4th word from the end).

• Random characters can be taken instead of the provided text file. In that case the text is made from randomly selected characters of the alphabet, added with special signs, such as ()_+*&^% etc.
• Use Quick Text. When checked the text in the box is used instead of the provided text in the input file. A ticked box overrides the text file data. The limitation is 256 lines of text, and in case the number of lines exceed 256, the 'Quick Text' will automatically be unchecked to avoid quality problems. It is advised to make longer sentences of the input text to avoid a large number of paragraphs (or lines). The box 'Random characters' must be unchecked to have this option working.

Using a web page content as text source

Text Mosaics can be made from a pre-loaded text file, but also using an URL of a web page. To activate that feature simply provide the URL and check the tick box. This feature is only available for licensed users. The URL must contain valid data. If the application doesn't find valid text (the web page source data is used) a warning is given, and the text from the file is used (as  normal text mosaic). You'll find the URL setting in the 'Tools' section (the tab on the right side).

Since web pages usually contain unpredictable variations of content, there is no practical way to find out if the page will be correctly loaded or not. In many cases this will be trial and error. For instance: http://www.google.com will generate an error, but http://www.google.nl won't. Many common words are already filtered out, but HTML, css and java script etc. is too elaborate to completely remove these kind of words automatically, so the content can be exciting or pretty dull, depending on the page.

Circle settings