imageCoder is inspired by Pete Corey's blog article and commit.io's service.
Contrary to the article by Pete, this program uses python instead of elixir and is a lot faster. The speed advantage is mainly due to operating directly on png-images and a slightly different approach to parsing the text. While the former approach limits one color per character, imageCoder overlays the text over the image and makes it transparent, thus the image can have multiple colors per character.
The program takes a png-file as a background image, a string for the name of the output image, and a text-file with text/code, furthermore, the user can directly change the font, font-size, and the width and height for the output image.
Without much further ado, here is a simple output image created by imageCoder using the python logo (taken from Wikimedia and converted to png using ImageMagick convert -background none -density 1000 -resize 1000x python.svg python.png) and the source-code for the merging function of pandas (as found here).
The command to recreate the picture below, is ./imageCoder.py -i python.png -o pythonCoder.png -t merge_pandas.py -f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu-font-family/UbuntuMono-B.ttf -s 10 -H 2000 -w 2000 (the best results imho come with a mono-spaced font)
If you want to increase the resolution of the image, I would suggest increasing both the size of the image to something above 10k and the font-size to roughly 20-40.
To see the full usage, run ./imageCoder.py -h, which currently shows you
usage: imageCoder.py [-h] -i IMAGEFILE -o IMAGEOUT -t TEXTFILE [-f FONT]
[-s FONTSIZE] [-w WIDTH] [-H HEIGHT]
imageCoder 0.1 (February 2017) by Author: David Zimmermann
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-i IMAGEFILE, --imageFile IMAGEFILE
input file for the background image
-o IMAGEOUT, --imageOut IMAGEOUT
filename for the output image
-t TEXTFILE, --textFile TEXTFILE
input file for the text/code
-f FONT, --font FONT fontname or font path to a truetype-font
-s FONTSIZE, --fontSize FONTSIZE
font size in pt
-w WIDTH, --width WIDTH
width of the output image
-H HEIGHT, --height HEIGHT
height of the output image
To use imageCoder make sure you have the following dependencies installed
- Python 2.7.12
- Pillow 2.2.1
To install Pillow, use sudo pip install Pillow.
Then you can download the tool with
git clone https://github.com/DavZim/imageCoder.git
use wget and unzip
wget https://github.com/DavZim/imageCoder/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip && cd imageCoder-master
or simply download, unzip, and navigate to the unzipped folder manually.
Make sure that the program is executable (chmod +x imageCoder.py) or use python imageCoder.py -i ... instead of ./imageCoder.py -i .... Et voila, you are ready to go.
Lastly, if you like this project, feel that it needs more functionality, find a mistake, or simply want to contribute, you are more than welcome to open an issue, fork the project, or make a pull-request. Also any kind of feedback is always welcome.