textorizer / excoffizer

Textorizer allows you to make pictures formed with text. It is best described by the sample images below. Although there are many versions around, the only one that is continuing to supported is this one. Excoffizer takes a picture and produces a vector rendition of the picture, made of parallel lines of varying thickness. It is inspired by Roger Excoffon's pictograms for the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics.

The previous version of Textorizer came as a downloadable application. It is still available on a separate page but is no longer maintained. The previous version of excoffizer is also still available and is also discontinued.

Right now, textorizer/excoffizer works in Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Some browsers will however struggle with larger output images. Opera works the best as of this writing.

Choose a mode

examples

Here are a few pictures produced with textorizer/excoffizer (click to see the text)

There is even a Textorized Group on Flickr, with many more examples.

Documentation

Click on textorizer, textorizer2 or excoffizer Select a picture on your computer Play with the controls or enter new text, and press preview

Source & Licensing

The source can be browsed on github.

Textorizer and excoffizer are © Max Froumentin 2008-2011. They are available under the 31 December 2002 W3C Software Licence. In short:

All Rights Reserved. This work is distributed under the W3C© Software License in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Support

Please email max @ froumentin . net for help. I try to answer all the emails, but I can't guarantee I ever will. All the older versions of textorizer are no longer supported, and I strongly discourage their use (if only because they have many more bugs and fewer features than the latest)

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Michael McQuade for designing the textorizer icon and to everyone who encouraged or suggested, and Rik Penny for making nice prints