Text art

I haver been using a lot of different programs for
my projects to create pretty text art for logos
web-side headers, game headers and such.

I'm talking about colorful bitmap-fonts.

Fonttext is OK for it's use and I have
been using the text-tool on Pinnacle studio.
I'm far to lazy to use hours and hours in PSP
or similiar to achieve poor results with my very
limited GFX skills. I need a simple program who
can make a font look GREAT for this use.

What do you use ?
Any recommendations ?

Sorry. You already mentioned FonText (which is what I use). If you don't think it's good enough, you can always take your FonText bitmap and run it through some of the GIMPs 'Script Fu' scripts, or write your own 3rd party preprocessor.

OK gotta check out those scripts as I'm getting into Gimp now.

i'm confused... are you talking about Ascii and Ansi art? or font-making?

if it is the first. I know a ton about Ascii and how to go about creating art with letterforms on an even field.

Ansi uses more parts and field colors, not just text. Thats not my thing.

it is hard to demo ascii in a forum tho. It requires a font change to something like terminal.

however. The basics are easy enough to get and you can take say, a drawing of the logo you want, blow it up to the right size in photoshop, make a new layer, grab the text tool and have at it with a font like terminal, that is, one where i and W take up the same amount of space.

then you use different characters to represent different darknesses and forms. Example:
# is one of the darkest while . is one of the lightest.
#W8HSKUVTOI|;:,. is a good gradient.

however, a true Ascii piece will create shapes with the letters themselves and their forms... some examples.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/18257255/

http://www.deviantart.com/view/20151998/

http://www.deviantart.com/view/16500287/

http://www.deviantart.com/view/16202718/

all of these are by jSepia, one of the best Ascii artists I know of.

http://jsepia.deviantart.com/

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even without the right font, this shows well the gradienting..

I'm talking about BITMAP fonts Dampe.
FD's idea og enhancing FontText bitmaps with
filters is not bad, but there should be programs
out there that does this all in one.
I'm sure the people in magazines and newspapers
does not create every logo og fancy colorful
font by themselves all the time, right ?

There must be a kick-ass tool for this !

Xara have some useful stuff but not quite what
I'm looking for....

Wedoe: I can't easily find anything great. Corel Draw does the basics but it won't do stuff like gradient or texture outlines and loads of stuff isn't supported.

DampeS8N: Yeah reading the title I thought like you but then I actualy *read* the first post and understood ... ;-)

twas


that made things unclear for me. lots of that is ascii... text-art = ascii and ansi.

fonts = typography.

you're diggin yourself a hole now...

I'm still using Draw Studio 2 through WinUAE for this type of stuff. Great combination of bitmap and vector based drawing. It's actually quite powerful so test it out before you start laughing. You'll need to organise font and bitmap conversion to/from Amiga friendly formats though.

http://www.haage-partner.de/com/products/ds_e.htm

Not bad idea kenshin, thanks, The Amiga was good
at much of the stuff todays GFX software-developers
often forget... :)

Adobe once did a program called ImageStyler, which is a very easy to use program with which you quickly can do some fancy looking texts. Its discontinued now, so you'll have to get it second-hand, but its quite good, I have it and uses it quite a bit. Used it for most of my gfx-demo stuff.

Download.com still have the trial for download here>

http://www.download.com/Adobe-ImageStyler/3000-2197_4-895487.html

Thx, I'll check it out :)

I found one myself too called "Pinnacle Title Deko Pro" but it's $199 :o(