ASCII art has as most loved children many names including ATASCII (Atari), PETSCII (Commodore), Block ASCII or High ASCII, Oldskool, Newskool and so on. It became mainstream through the inclusion of .nfo files in the Warez community, but is today a respected art form. And I've actually been to "offline" art exhibits here in my home town (which is quite small) where they have used it to display the source code of Super Mario Bros as a piece of art.
So when I saw this Ajaxian Article
about an ASCII art generator in Flash I felt compelled to demonstrate it could easily be done in a standardized set of web technologies.
I set out to see if I could find
some libraries to use, and I found Sau Fan Lee's codeproject article
about his ASCII fying .Net library. It was GPL so it mixed perfectly together with Gaia. So I just brushed it up a little bit, added some Gaia Ajax for falvor, and voila! Have fun!
All the Ajax is of course built with Gaia Ajax Widgets ;)
All the code can be downloaded here and is GPL so you can use it as you wish as long as you comply with the GPL license terms. If you find bugs, cleans up the code or
in any other ways improves it (hint; Linux/Mono port would be awesome) I'd be more than willing to host the modified code here and update the running version with credits to you, email it then if so to thomas dot hansen at gaiaware dot net :)
PS!
It's not 100% stable (not Gaia's fault) and doesn't handle every image you try, I've found it to be able to reproduce ASCII art for about 50% of the images I've tested it on. Just try new images if it fails ;)