How do you create an image using different fonts of texts not ASCII art but the whole image is made up of large and small letters?

Answer

Back in the 1980's I used to teach at the University of Waikato Computer Science Department. In the stair well they had a huge black and white mural made by the method you described. It was made in panels printed with a "line printer" which had a large spinning metal drum about 4 inches in diameter and the same width as the computer paper. Behind the paper there were about 120 solenoid operated hammers in a line that would "wait for the letter they wanted to come around on the spinning drum and as the letter sped past the hammer would fire and push the paper against the drum". There was a huge wide type-writer ribbon impregnated in ink between the paper and the drum. When the hammer momentarily fired, the typeset letter on the drum pressed against the ribbon, which then imprinted the letter onto the paper.

This type of printer could be programmed to over-type one letter on top of another, and thus create some very dark spots but on the other hand you could also make light spots with characters like a period, and medium grey like a letter M. The appearance of each spot when viewed from the distance simply depended on the amount of ink used by the character or overlaid characters. A computer program was used to set up a table of grey scale values and the characters used to make those levels of grey. Then an image could be created using this grey scale for each "pixel".

Having said all that I do not know where you can get software to create this type of image with modern computers! Of course you could write your own!

-DJ Craig's Dad

First answer by DJ Craig. Last edit by DJ Craig. Contributor trust: 852 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 39 [recommend question]

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