Asciifi - an ASCII art converter for a more civilized age

by ChrisArchitect • 15 years ago

46 26 15 years ago

zachwill3• 15 years ago

Haha, nice — I'm the developer if anyone has any questions (it's using a canvas element to convert images/data URIs to ASCII art).

Also, here's a link to the Github repo: https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi

a3_nm2• 15 years ago

I wonder which algorithm you're using? From very quick testing, it looks like you're picking characters to represent various grayscale values, but I'm not sure that you're taking the shape of the characters into account like other converters do.

zachwill3• 15 years ago

I used a combination of Tab Atkins' and the MooTools ASCII art (https://github.com/khrome/MooAsciiArt.js) algorithms. The four ASCII options came from those two libraries, as well (I played around with the values on various pictures until I found ones that I thought worked the best).

You can also take a look at the Asciify and AsciiCharacter classes in the CoffeeScript file (https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi/blob/master/static/js/ap...).

stephth• 15 years ago

Fun site. But why haven't you written credits to the music?

pace• 15 years ago

Great project -- I'd like to have the time for such side-projects

comex• 15 years ago

The site declaims "crappy PHP scripts", yet it is broken for me (on Safari 5.1.1) :)

There are two copies of the video: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1237941/Screen%20Shot%202011-11-28%2...

zachwill3• 15 years ago

Just pushed a change to the way the video is embedded — hopefully that takes care of the bug.

aculver• 15 years ago

Uploaded my favorite photo of our 12 week old daughter in the hopes that I could stuff it into the repo of some new project. When attempting to adjust the line width, Chrome went "Aw, Snap!"

Would love to see this again when all the kinks are worked out.

alexhaefner• 15 years ago

Sometimes, as a web developer, you have no consistent way to diagnose these issues. We found an issue using drag and drop uploads on one of our sites where if you uploaded the same image in chrome, one after another, it would crash. So I wouldn't give all the flak to the developer, as it might be chrome.

burgerbrain3• 15 years ago

I am having a hard time understanding the purpose of the video on that page...

thirsteh• 15 years ago

Did you notice the contents of the text box change while the video is playing?

burgerbrain3• 15 years ago

I did not, my browser window was not large enough to view both at once. Even so, this strikes me as a very strange use of a flash video.

starwed2• 15 years ago

Nope. I suspect the site is fundamentally broken in my browser[1], given that I see two video elements, and the textbox is overlaid on top of several other elements, and there are some control elements floating seemingly randomly on the page.

Here's a screenshot of what I see: http://imgur.com/cET4F. Might be the nightly build's fault, of course!

1. FF nightly build, 11.0a1 (2011-11-28)

wingerlang• 15 years ago

It is not very often you hear that song out in the wild. Nice.

For anyone interested it is called "fetts vette"

afc• 15 years ago

I thought the opposite: ugh, it has some shitty (for my taste) music, lets just close it. :-/

harbud• 15 years ago

Thanks. I think the music sounds cool and is quite apt for the page.

exDM69• 15 years ago

I don't consider auto generated ASCII figures (from aalib or libcaca or similar) to be art. To me, art implies there is an artist behind the work of art or the technique used to generate it.

Real artists do their ASCII art 7 bits at a time.

morsch• 15 years ago

In that case the developer of the converter (library) is the artist. I'm sure there's a lot of creative input involved in auto-converting a raster image into an ASCII figure.

brianxq3• 15 years ago

props on the mc chris!

atomicdog• 15 years ago

Hmm, it would be interesting to try to use this to generate ascii heightmaps for games out of images.

bane• 15 years ago

Real artists work in ANSI

http://sixteencolors.net/

http://artscene.textfiles.com/acid/

http://artscene.textfiles.com/ice/

jasonkester• 15 years ago

Why the #eee on #fff color scheme? It took me a long time to realize that the white blur in the scroll area was changing, and that if I highlighted it it looked like an image.

Turn up the contrast so we can see it!

Asciifi - an ASCII art converter for a more civilized age

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