Have your ever seen faces, pics in ASCII collection of characters, well you can convert your online for FREE at text-image.com and what’s more you can also use the cool HTML mode too.
I understand the HTML mode only and I once created a .NET App in C#. The trick is to break the Image (Graphic Object) into all its pixels and read in the color value for the individual pixels (Picture Element) saving them in another file with a mapping of the their position in the image. I have lost the code for it but when I feel like programming for fun again I will paste it here.
You can use the GDI+ classes for this… I remember the ‘Get Pixel’ function. If any of you knows how to create in the ASCII version please share it with me, I find it very curious.
Another very interesting image based online utility I stumbled upon is the Rasterbator at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/wizard.gas ...
As the creators say on their site and I quote “The rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters!”.
Another thing I noticed is that they return the Image as a PDF file, using .Text# an C# based open source project running at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/ (source forge).