How to use a jpeg->ascii image encoder for my image viewer?

[rasputozen]

I've been trying everything I could think of to get my external image viewer program to simply process all images like so: "imagemagick %s jpg:- | jp2a -" so that imagemagick first converts every image to jpeg and then jp2a converts the jpeg to ascii so that the image can be viewed in a simple w3m buffer (I tried mailcap entries, various commands in all the options related to image viewing, etc).

I thought I would be able to do something similar to how the dictionary look-up command was implemented, that I could make a cgi script that takes the image file w3m captures and construct a page using a shell script with the ascii encoded contents. Maybe this is possible and I just haven't figured it out but I don't know what else I can try.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.