ZW Text Mosaic 0.5 beta

ZW Text Mosaic is a cute and small application that can convert your images into nice mosaics using only ASCII characters. As input you can use any BMP or JPEG image file, and the program will generate an HTML file.

The program offers you a creative alternative to help you enhance your web pages – thus, instead of simply inserting images, you can turn them into text-based renditions of the original compositions. Once generated, you can open the output HTML file and edit it just like any other web page, adding content, other images or text mosaics, etc. You could also cut and paste the HTML containing the mosaic and use it in other HTML files.

The conversion process is really simple, and requires no expertise from the user. The program will only ask you for an image file and will transform it into text using some preset parameters. These parameters can be customized, and they refer to the size of the resulting mosaic, the background color, and the text used to create the mosaic (TEXT, by default). The program includes a simple viewer where you can compare the output mosaic with the original image.

The result is always gratifying – it works well with almost all kind of images, though “flat” images (with very few color contrasts) produce less appealing mosaics.