Melikbilge

Htm2Pic.com has a piece of software that I found out about from gHacks.net called Image2Html. This basically is a program that converts a photo or batch converts many photos to a ASCII-art-style picture. Except, the output is color instead of the standard black-and-white ASCII art. I tested this and was sort of suspicious of its safety, since I couldn’t delete the folder after downloading the software because it was being used by a program.

Anyway, the program runs as a standalone application, so you don’t have to install it. However, it does appear on the taskbar, which I found strange. You can change the background color, the mask, etc. of the output. I couldn’t figure out how to change the color of the space behind the characters, even though I changed the settings. So I changed it manually from an HTML editor.

The output is a rather slow-loading, high size html file. The file is “result.html” if you convert a single file that appears in the program’s root folder. If you batch converted, you select the output destination yourself before the conversion. The picture on the html file looks almost exactly like the photo, except it has a border around it (which I believe you can turn off) and the small white space between the characters.

For the code-conscious, you’ve probably looked at the source code of the output. The html file uses both new styling with CSS and old quirks mode html tags, like center. With almost all pure HTML, with the exception of the CSS, each little “pixel” of the picture has its own color code, making the source code rather long (try 22 pages of code if you attempt to print the source code.)

Overall, I found the program to be excellent at making the html files accurately from each picture. However, its settings are sometimes non-responsive and the file-size is high, causing pages to load rather slowly.

The download page of Image2Html is here and a gallery of examples can be found here. I gave it a try and here’s a link to one I made. (Caution: examples may load slowly and make your fan start up.)

Filed under: Reviews by Melik