VerMan's Art Converter for Windows

The creator of VerMan's Art Converter admits in the program's documentation that he created the program to impress a girl (and to practice his C+ skills). The girl wasn't impressed, but we were, at least to some extent. In terms of useful software, VerMan's Art Converter ranks pretty low on the list, but if you want to play around with word art, it's worth checking out.

The program has a plain interface that's easy to navigate, as each step in the process is outlined for you. First, select the image you want to work with. Then choose whether you want to create ASCII art or a text mosaic. If you choose the latter, you'll also select the color mode, font, and input text. Then just select your desired image quality and click Process. The program will prompt you to select an output location for the new file and then you're done. We liked the program's ASCII art quite a bit; we ended up with a cool-looking portrait of ourselves rendered mostly in pound signs and ampersands. Things didn't work out so well for us with the text mosaic; our images ended up looking like we were just viewing the originals through a thick screen. Still, the program is a lot of fun to experiment with, and anyone who's interested in word art will enjoy adjusting the program's settings and trying different source images to see what they can come up with.

VerMan's Art Converter comes as a ZIP file and is accessible after extraction with no need for installation.