
Textify: Convert images to HTML text - nephics
http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/textify/
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jasonkester
Nice.

One thing that's obviously missing is a way to link to the image you've just
created. I have a nice looking photo sitting there, but seemingly the only way
to share it is to view source, copy, paste into a new HTML file and upload it
to a server somewhere.

Have it start each new session at a random URL that you can share, and this
will get very popular very fast.

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hakim
Thanks for the comment. Will definitely add functionality for sharing images.
I also just purchased textify.it and will be moving this project there.

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ssdsa
I did something similar in 1997 (!):
<http://home.wtal.de/ss/html/pnmtohtml/baby_032.html> What do you think?

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jasonkester
That's awesome. It's amazing how much we could actually do back in the days of
Netscape and IE version 4 and below.

Performance on the machines of the day was actually better than modern HTML5
stuff on modern hardware because the DOM was so much simpler and tuned toward
performance. I could actually watch the little games I made using DIVs/LAYERs
and pixel art images slow down during the 2000s as new browsers came out. It's
only now, with quad core processors that they're back up to the speed they
used to run on a Pentium.

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owenmarshall
I had a similarly amusing moment years back when I saw a bit-blit demo in the
browser. All this excitement about something that was state of the art on
Commodore 64s.

(And yes, I _do_ understand how the ubiquitous nature of the web actually
makes this important... but I still find it funny!)

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highace
"Convert images to HTML text. Drag and drop images on to the page to start
_murdering your browser!_ "

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geekzgalore
I agree. The tab hogs memory and kills the browser.

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hartror
Works fine for me.

Ubuntu 11.04 - Chrome 11

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geekzgalore
Windows XP - Firefox 5.0a2. Works today though.

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michael_dorfman
Maybe it's me, but I can't get this to work (in either Chrome 12 or IE9).

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AgnesLam
For me, it works in Chrome but not IE.

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pmanacas
Try deleting all characters from "Character set" and click APPLY SETTINGS :-)

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joshaidan
I love the quality of the image when you set the character quantity to max,
but I notice the speed of the rendering gets progressively slower with each
pass.

And now I start pondering the scalability of the algorithm.

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antihero
Using • you can recreate pointillism :)

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wtracy
I got some neat painterly effects with /\|

(Be prepared to crank it up to something like 50000 characters if you don't
want half the image to be background color, though.)

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fcolaco
We released an App for Android/iPhone/iPad/iWhatever a few weeks ago with the
same concept, but using artwork elements to recreate the photo, instead of
text. It's called Pixeroid :) <http://pixeroid.com> Update coming soon

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HardyLeung
This is cool! If you could use characters with different font sizes it may
look better. Also kinda slow. You wanna explain a bit what you do? Is it just
image -> choose a random point set -> draw? Is this based on Canvas or CSS?

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jaredwill
<http://textify.it/js/hakim.textify.min.js>: "Recreates bitmap images using
HTML text. Images are drawn onto a canvas element so that the pixels can be
read. Letters, with colors matching the image pixels, are then placed at
random locations on the screen."

Looks like it also uses dat.gui for drawing.

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VMG

        Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required 'server/util.php' 
        (include_path='.:/hsphere/shared/apache/libexec/php4ext/php/') in 
        /hsphere/local/home/hakim/hakim.se/experiments/html5/textify/index.php on line 3

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hakim
You must've reloaded just as I was uploading a small update.

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hartror
Best way to do updates is to deploy new versions to separate directories and
just change a symlink. Bonus is you can quickly revert to the older version if
you find an issue.

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JoachimSchipper
I was expecting automatic ASCII art, like <http://aa-
project.sourceforge.net/gallery/>, but this is nice too.

The submission needs a lot of characters, though.

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gojomo
I somewhat expected JS-based OCR. But this is cool, too!

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romain_g
That is really great! Besides export options, what would it take to be able to
modify the density over certain areas of the output image?

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cygwin98
Not exactly the ascii art I expected. But still very cool anyway.

Also, it would be great, if someone implements figlet[1] using html5.

[1] www.figlet.org

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arkem
This is cool! There's a typo in the controls, it says "Back & White" when it
should be "Black & White"

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Flam
Hakim, you always make cool things. :)

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hbrouwer
I dragged in a screenshot of OSX. Makes the dock look cool ;-)

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SonicSoul
worked great for me. awesome! i've been wanting to learn Processing so i could
create public apps like this that do fun things to photos.. has anyone done
that?

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justatdotin
I really like it. well done.

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jzting
Love it.

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how_impressive
Why?

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tincholio
Why not?

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elliptical
And the purpose?

