Artem

This is a small cli program written in rust to easily convert images to ascii art, named after the latin word for art. It will take a while to generate the ascii characters, especially for larger images. By default it tries to use truecolor, if the terminal does not support truecolor, it falls back to 16 Color ANSI. When the ascii image is written to a file, the image will not use colors. It supports .jpeg, .png, .gif, .webp and many more.

Examples

Input

source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Abraham_Lincoln_head_on_shoulders_photo_portrait.jpg

Output

Usage

For simply converting an image:

artem PATH

For more options use:

artem --help

To use custom ascii chars, use the --characters (or -c for short) argument.The characters should be ordered from darkest/densest to lightest. If the background should be invisible, add a space at the end. Alternatively this program has already 3 predefined character sets, accessibly by supplying the --characters argument to gether with the number (0, 1 or 2) of the preset that should be used. By default preset 1 is used.

artem PATH --characters "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789<>|,.-#+!$%&/()=?*'_:; "

To change the size at which the converted image is displayed, use:

#for auto sizing height
artem PATH --height
#for auto-sizing width
artem PATH --width
#for manual resizing use the --size flag
artem PATH --size 100

To save the the image to a file, use the --output flag.

artem PATH --output ascii.txt
#if the output file is an html file, the resulting ascii art will be saved as html ascii art
artem PATH --output ascii.html
# or alternatively, use an .asn file for colored ascii art
artem PATH --output ascii.ans

Installation

The easiest way to install artem is using cargo with

cargo install artem

Alternatively, if you are on Debian/Ubuntu download the .deb file from the releases tab and install it with:

sudo dpkg -i artem.deb

One other distributions use the binary file provided in the release tab.

Building from source

If you have rust/cargo installed, you can build the project with:

cargo build

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. Please be aware that it might take some time for someone to respond.

Credits/Inspiration

This projects was heavily inspired by jp2a as well as the coding train video on ascii art.

Also a big thanks to ripgrep for indirectly helping with inspiration for the build setup.

Todo

• Better average the RGB values of multiple pixel

• Use the current terminal size to auto fit the image

• Support ANSI terminal colors

• Convert output to colored html

• Use multithreading

• Add tests

• Add even more test

• Convert multiple files at once

• Automate copying of completion files from OUT_DIR to deployment/assets

• Change name

• Publish

Ideas

• Use edge detection and directional ascii

• Implement better resizing

License

Mozilla Public License 2.0.