Text to PNGs: A tool to prepare image files which contain text

Why you need this

Many psychology experiments put text on a computer display, either as prompts or as stimuli for participants to react to. Inconsistency in psychology experiment conditions is bad: unless varying the stimuli is the point of the experiment you want all participants reacting to exactly the same stimuli. Theoretically any experimental software could render (draw) the text on the display itself. The problem is that the way the text is drawn -- the pixels that the computer chooses to turn black or white -- varies tremendously with things you wouldn't expect. Different versions of the operating system may draw text differently. Text can be drawn differently on two identical computers plugged into different displays. Text can be drawn using slightly different colours depending on which other colours are visible on the display.

This tool allows you to pre-render your text as image files in PNG format (a widely used format which can be used by many programs on many different platforms. Then you can tell your software to display one of these images and know exactly what will be in front of the eyes of your participants.

• You can paste the contents of the 'settings' are into a text file and save it somewhere in case you need to remember what you did, or change a setting later and have all the files regenerated.
• You can include the settings text in your writeup (as an appendix ?), so people can see exactly what stimuli you used in your experiment.
• You can pass that text, or the image files this program creates, to someone else trying to understand or reproduce your experiment.

Work area

Output

The results of your settings should appear here. You can drag these images into a folder one by one or download a .zip file of them all.