With this feature you can create your own ASCII art picture by simply drawing lines only. For convenience, a background picture can be used and act as a guide to draw your own art. In the example below the available viewing modes are shown. From L to R: all visible; only lines; grid + characters; characters. The transparency of the background picture can be also be set.

Size settings

• Font size sets the size of the grid. A large font size results in a coarse grid. The smaller the font, the more characters are used and the more accurate the ASCII art will become. A too small size (< 10) may result in bad reading or printing quality.
• Pen thickness sets the size of the pen/mouse when drawing lines. It is recommended to keep the pen size appr. a quarter of the font size. When the font size is changed the pen size changes along with this optimum ratio. This can be overruled by manually changing the pen size again.
• Use these characters for drawing are the used characters by the matching engine. It is recommended to keep the number of characters low, and preferably only use 'line-ish' characters. We have already selected the most effective line-drawing characters. But any character will work.

Pen and eraser

Two controls are available: a pen and an eraser. The pen () is the default action, drawing black lines on a white canvas, where the background picture is shining through or not. The eraser () is selected by pressing the SHIFT button while drawing. Effectively the pen colour turns into white, and then acts as an eraser with the same thickness as the pen.

Restore a previous result

Each time a line is drawn, a snapshot is made of the canvas. By pressing CTRL+Z the previous snapshot can be restored. This is the normal Windows way to Undo an effect. Only 10 Undo's are stored, then the first Undo is overwritten with the next one. There is no 'Redo' available. When the button 'Create draw lines' is pressed, the characters are placed as a layer on the canvas (these characters can not be erased: it's not the same drawing layer). When Undo is used and lines are undone, this layer of characters will not be undone. Instead, ignore this layer and then press the button 'Create draw lines' again. The new characters will now be correctly placed.

Layer and quality settings

• There are 4 layers: one for the background picture, one for the ASCII text characters, one for the drawn lines and one for the grid. Each of these layers can be shown or hidden. Only the background image layer has a smooth transparency control (from 0 to 100% transparent), the others can be shown or hidden by ticking the corresponding check boxes.
• The control for sharpness determines how much pixels of a line are taken into account in each cell of the grid. A low sharpness will result in a very dense character image because every line pixel is counted, and will be transformed into a character (even if one pixel is found in an adjacent cell). The example below demonstrates the effect more vivid than words can do. From L to R: the drawn lines + no sharpness; then in 5 steps an increase of sharpness: 0, 5, 10, 15 and 25. In the last picture only very outspoken parts of the drawn lines are transformed into characters.