asciitopgm just rendered dollops on the page. Completely unreadable.
Rendering postscript from the text and then to jpg nearly worked.
However, there is always some point in the conversion chain that spoils the final outcome. the first test to postscript conversion is hampered by limitations of the media. So in my case text lines would extend beyond the page edge and wrap to the next line. Changing media to A2 fits the lines on okay although the page size has varying effects on subsequent conversion to jpg or tiff.
Most final results using the scripts suggested or even the convert command were poor.
In the end Imagemagick is the tool!
Imagemagic's "convert" can draw text into an image. It has the feature to draw multi line text from a file An example of its use is
Code:
convert -font DejaVu-Sans-Mono-Bold -pointsize 14 -gravity northwest label:@infile.txt outfile.jpg
There is some playing around required to find a font that doesn't squash whitespace but you can control font and poinsize and the rendered image adjusts to line length.
Cool!