Playing around in Flash making a ‘image encoder’ that converts text into image, or String into BitmapData. Basically, I wanted to convert each character into binary, and then represent it as an image. So the first thing I did was have each character assigned a number, and then convert that into binary. Since I wanted to control what characters could be encoded, I created an array of the characters I wanted (instead of using the charCode) and used the index of the character as it’s id. Each character is converted into a 7-digit binary value (this value was based off of the array length) and then each digit is written to bitmap data, 0 as black and 1 as white.
I tried the same thing, but except with a color image. Instead of having 7 pixels representing a character, I used one pixel per character, converting each charCode into a hex value. The result is that the image is all blue, as the common used character codes are all under 255. Not a very useful exercise, but it was still sort of fun, as was converting a number into binary “manually.” (It involves a lot of use of modulo. )
The image bellow is the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland encoded into an image. Note: I chose Alice in Wonderland because it is copyright free, not because of the new trailer for Tim Burton movie. There’s a larger example here with the color image as well.
