A couple of years ago or so I ran into a shareware program that converted image files into text characters. Being the software junkie that I am I gave it a try and was really pleased with the resulting effect. I remember thinking about using these text pictures as a design element in my personal website that I was building at the time (which I eventually did, although ironically I converted the text back into a jpeg as it was easier to handle that way, which is also what I did below).