ascii-rs allows you to generate high resolution ascii art based on character weight, and resulting semantics.
It aims to speed up the manual and low resolution process. Without relying purely on colour and negative space information like many shader-based solutions.
Just git clone and cargo build however you want.
Invoke help with ascii-rs -h:
Usage: ascii-rs [OPTIONS] <IMAGE_PATH>
Arguments:
<IMAGE_PATH>
Options:
--width <MAX_WIDTH>
--height <MAX_HEIGHT>
--light-chars <LIGHT_CHARS> [default: ?%#@]
--medium-chars <MEDIUM_CHARS> [default: DOS]
--dark-chars <DARK_CHARS> [default: .,]
--edge-chars <EDGE_CHARS> [default: /\]
--luma-threshold-mid <LUMINANCE_THRESHOLD_MID> [default: 50]
--luma-threshold-high <LUMINANCE_THRESHOLD_HIGH> [default: 95]
--canny-threshold-low <CANNY_THRESHOLD_LOW> [default: 10]
--canny-threshold-high <CANNY_THRESHOLD_HIGH> [default: 50]
--no-colour
--output-edges
--seed <SEED> [default: 1234567890]
-h, --help Print help🚨Does your ascii art have weird dimensions?
Not all typefaces and line settings work well for ascii art.
All examples in this repo are generated with:
- font size
< 8; - alacritty line offset
offset = { x = 0, y = -11 }; - Courier New typeface.
These are not my usual terminal settings.
🚨Thresholding is fiddly.
It's quite difficult to find edge and luma thresholds that work across various images.
For best results, you need to experiment with different values.
Pass --output-edges to inspect the Canny algorithm output.
🚨It's slow
While ascii conversion is fast, Canny can take quite long.
Your typical terminal is going to be < 500 characters wide.
There's no point processing images larger than that.
See recipes.
cargo run -- test_inputs/godfather.jpg --width=200 --luma-threshold-mid 100 --luma-threshold-high 175 --no-colour
cargo run -- test_inputs/godfather.jpg --width=200 --luma-threshold-mid 100 --luma-threshold-high 175
cargo run -- test_inputs/nyc.jpg --width 250 --luma-threshold-mid 50 --luma-threshold-high 170 --no-colour
cargo run -- test_inputs/nyc.jpg --width 250 --luma-threshold-mid 50 --luma-threshold-high 170
cargo run -- test_inputs/tom.jpg --width=150 --luma-threshold-mid 100 --luma-threshold-high 175
cargo run -- test_inputs/tom.jpg --width=150 --luma-threshold-mid 100 --luma-threshold-high 175 --no-colour
- 9873e7408a2b81259cd905901fc43d0b5d69256d -- mid-tone gradation
- 13ea38f9eec250bcc9c678d516e6dc288c4dc469 -- choose char using luma
- a6ba5eef0beb1195804553d2d8717401f28ffc20 -- edge detection
- 83d2e2601059a6d3f431218505cffe362d851ad5 -- print coloured ascii