The first fractal-text association sample I saw was a fractal image created by Stephen C. Ferguson to which he added a mathematical expression (a fractal formula). Shortly thereafter, Terry Wright went further, and added a complete poem over one of his own images, with what he started his already famous fractal poems. After seeing those two examples I wondered how difficult it would be to convert a fractal image to plain ASCII characters (after all, language has fractal characteristics too).

As can be imagined, preserving a fractal image using character strings proved to be very difficult by hand. After some frustrating attempts to "redraw" one of my own fractal images into ASCII art, I did a search through various software collections (it was 1999) and found a small freeware application, called ASCIIPic, which could do the job in a "flash". This application selects a predefined character according to the shades of an image, and traces its pattern to an ASCII file output automatically. Once the task is done, it's just a matter of "find and replace" to change certain characters to render it closer to real ASCII art or to select another character that better pleases the eye.

Figure 1: Actual view of ASCIIPic's main window.

Soon, I started to add HTML coding to assign colors to the images and to put them online. That, in a sense, made the files less "complex" because a single character can be used to trace the whole picture, but turned them from normal text archives (6 Kb mean size) into a bitmap equivalent (115 Kb, and even more). I later added some graphic elements to make some of the ASCII pictures a little bit more "artistic", and even toyed with the idea of adapting sentences and short poems to the fractal patterns. This last thing is still waiting for a good time.