Nuclear Nova Software has announced ASCII Art, its first graphics and media app for Mac OS X. It’s a generator that converts digital pictures into text art.

You can output art to both black/white text and full color, with the ability to export plain text, html, tif, and rtf files. A user editable character set adjusts the available characters to be used, while the maximum character width option controls the finished product size.

Compatible source images include jpeg, png, gif, bmp, psd, tif, tga, jpg, tiff, and more. Output quality greatly depends on the input file. Often images such as clip art work better than sources such as digital pictures.

ASCII Art requires Mac OS X 10.5. It’s Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.

The ASCII Art demo is feature limited and free to try. The full version of ASCII Art is US$19.95 and may be purchased through Nuclear Nova Software’s web site (http://nuclearnova.com/asciiart.php). The paid version includes all features and options, saving/copying, and does not watermark the finished product.