Not nearly as cool, but I was able to show a colleague the letters in a raster image section of a pdf using xxd by varying the output width
Not nearly as cool, but I was able to show a colleague the letters in a raster image section of a pdf using xxd by varying the output width
I wrote a simple tool, when I was a kid, that dumped binaries into VGA mode 0x13 and allowed me to vary the width. Mode 0x13 is one byte per pixel so it was just a simple REP MOVSB to put data into the buffer (no worrying about bitplanes). It was so useful in reverse engineering software. Besides raster data, regular data structures often jump out.
Fun fact, if you load a file with extension ".data" into GIMP there's a UI where you can set the pixel format and adjust the width/height with sliders
Photoshop does the same with the .raw extension.
I did the same thing to evaluate random number generators by drawing pixels with the count value. You see a pattern, line or clusters? Bad generator.