i was trying to make some cool stuff out of text glyphs and kinda failed. i thought: wouldn't it be neat if i could reproduce an image using a small number of glyphs from wingdings or even a regular font? i'd only need to store the quantized position, rotation, scale, the glyph itself and some color.

so i wrote a nicely threaded program to churn through the possibilities and find me some nice glyph placements. it uses the simulated annealing meta-heuristic so i could be lazy and just tell it how close it is to the target image and let it figure out for itself a good path to the minimum error.

unfortunately the results are not the coolness i was hoping for. :( i think packing of glyphs without overlap is much cooler in the end. with all the overlap it looks like a jumbled mess! okay here you can see what i'm talking about:

nd05 eye02 down red