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Graphical Montage Tools from Text or Other Graphics?

Posted by Cliff on from the reproducing-art-in-various-ways dept.

Recently, I've had two readers come looking for some obscure graphical tools. Their requests were similar enough in a sense that I felt I would post them both in a single article. For those of you who remember, there was a tool that would display Tux the penguin in colored text from the Linux source code. Well, I'm sure there are several tools like that out there creating images out of things more interesting than that. This article is for those people looking for those or similar programs.

Eli asks: "Ages ago on Slashdot there was a post of a company in England who would take a picture you sent them and they would return it to you as a poster with every pixel in the original represented with a greyscale character. It was nifty, but it cost money. Then a few days later, someone posted a Gimp Script-Fu that did the same thing, for free, in full color, with any user supplied text file. I used this for ages but have since lost the script. Do any of you old skewl dotters happen to have this in an archive somewhere? Has anyone made improvements to it? It's not in the /. archives. I'm sure it was pre-Andover days."

And this related question from Panu Hällfors, which is asking more for a specific website than a software tool, but I figure there is a software tool behind there somewhere: "Some time ago there was this project of making a huge image montage in which small Linux-related images would make up a picture of Tux. I used to check out the preview versions every now and then and even submit a few pictures myself. But now! Where's the site? What has happened?

Neither their site nor their email account (linux@remotepoint.com) seems to exists anymore. Does anyone know who were working on the project and where they are now? I'd like to see the project go on, if possible."

So I'm sure there is software out there for creating an image out of specified text or even other images. What packages are out there? Which ones do you use?

6 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. Gray Scale Mosaic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    Try Gray Scale Mosaic

  2. Re:Photo- and text-mosaics by Dashslot · · Score: 2

    Patented it might be, but you can still get hold of Metapixel (for example, by looking on Google) which composes a single image out of database of thousands.

    Of course, you need that database of images, but what else are 100,001 pieces of clipart CDs good for?

  3. 545studios.com had PixelTransformer by scotpurl · · Score: 2

    You'll have to search for it (I can't get to http://www.545studios.com) but they used to make a lot of really cool, small utils. PixelTransformer was Windows based, but free. 545 Studios also churned out a lot of skins for different programs.

  4. Photo- and text-mosaics by nutsy · · Score: 2

    The method of combining photos into a mosaic, like every other good idea on the planet, is patented. Try pbmtoascii for textual mosaics.

  5. Thinkgeek by poochie · · Score: 2

    The guys at thinkgeek used something similar to what you're talking about. Its for the tux psoter made out of the kernel source code. Here's the link... http://www.thinkgeek.com/opensource/ It goes from image to PS.....so i dunno if thats what youre looking for, but good luck in your search:)

  6. Some starting points... by NaturePhotog · · Score: 2

    You mean an ASCII version of Tux like this? I believe it's done using kernel source for the text. There are numerous RPMs for it found by searching on Google, including this list. If you're in to alternative Tux logos, look here, referenced by the earlier Slashdot article. Not sure about the more general "images into Tux" software, though.