How can I make ASCII text that will look good on Facebook?

Question

I'm making a .NET application that will take any picture and spit out ASCII text that will appear just like the image.

So far, it works well when the font is Lucida Console. Facebook doesn't use this font and thus break the art illusion.

Any thoughts, ideas and suggestions on how to tackle this problem? It's pretty a pretty neat idea! :)

EDIT:

Facebooks default font is:

font-family: "lucida grande", "tahoma", "verdana", "arial", sans-serif;

How do you suggest I solve this unique problem. :)

EDIT 2: Added more relevant tags.

Answer 1

Here's an interesting "bended" idea:

There's a set of "Mathematical monospace" characters in Unicode, that always render using a monospace font. On my computer, even though the font chosen is DejaVu Sans, the font used to render these characters changes to DejaVu Sans Mono.

The ranges are:

• U+1D670 to U+1D689 for A-Z
• U+1D68A to U+1D6A3 for a-z
• U+1D7F6 to U+1D7FF for 0-9

Try and see if you can see these on your computer:

If you see these as letters and numbers, and in monospace, you're good to go! I'm on Ubuntu 10.10, and my fonts have these characters.

Here's a screenshot of the above example on Ubuntu:

http://i25.tinypic.com/30ijhjs.png

Answer 2

There's a generator out there that works with variable width fonts:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ascgen2/

Maybe you could peek at its source for some ideas (but no stealing, of course!). Or, since it's an open source project, you and the author could collaborate and work on it together?