pbmtochar dds

Pbmtochar, chartopbm

Ever wondered how you could create line printer art? I am referring to those line printer pictures composed by ASCII characters. Here are two additions for pbmplus. Pbmtochar reads a portable bitmap and outputs a picture drawn by using characters. Chartopbm reads a text file and produces a bitmap containing those characters. Unlike pbmtoascii, pbmtochar pattern matches against the X11 8x13 fixed width font and thus creates much smaller output. Converting a text file into a bitmap and then back to text doesn't change the file (appart from non-printable characters and space padding). Both programs don't depend on the ASCII character set. I used the 8x13 font, because it produced the best results on printers.

In order to use these programs you need to compile them with the rest of the pbmplus collection. The collection was posted in volume9 of comp.sources.misc. Add the programs and manual pages to the pbm directory of pbmplus and add the appropriate entries to the Makefile.

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Last modified: 2001-11-17