Image ASCII Art

English | 繁體中文

The project is a simplified C language version of ASCII-generator.
It aims to reimplement part of its core functionalities in C, providing a simple tool for converting images into ASCII art.

Project Scope

• Focuses on converting images to ASCII art. Convertion for videos is not included at this stage.
• Simplifies the multilingual character sets from ASCII-generator, providing only general-purpose character sets and english character set.

Function Modules

File Name	Description	Status
img2txt.py	Image → Text	✓
img2img.py	Image → Grayscale ASCII Art	✓
img2img_color.py	Image → Colored ASCII Art	✓

How to Use

1. Build Executable
   You can use either the Makefile or script/build.ps1 to compile the source code.
   The build process will generate main (Unix/Linux) or main.exe (Windows).

2. Run main

   Parameters
       --type          Required. Function type.
       --input         Required. Path to the input image.
       --output        Required. Path to the output file.
       --num_cols      Optional. Number of output columns.
       --mode          Optional. Character set.
       --background    Optional. Background color.
   
   Accepted values and defaults
       --type          ["text", "image", "image_color"]
       --input         Path string
       --output        Path string
       --num_cols      Integer                           Default: 300
       --mode          ["simple", "complex", "english"]  Default: complex
       --background    ["white", "black"]                Default: black
   

   Example Commands

   Text Output

   ./main --type text --input ./input.png --output ./output.txt

   Grayscale ASCII Image Output (Black Background)

   ./main --type image --input ./input.png --output ./output.png --mode complex --background black

   Colored ASCII Image Output (White Background)

   ./main --type image_color --input ./input.png --output ./output.png --num_cols 200 --mode simple --background white

Demo

Raw Image

Image to Text

Image to Grayscale ASCII Image

Image to Colored ASCII Image

Comparison with ASCII-generator

Below are two comparisons. Each group contains three images, in order:

• Original image
• Image generated by ASCII-generator
• Image generated by Image-ASCII-Art

Comparison (1)

Comparison (2)

References & Tools

• vietnh1009/ASCII-generator：Original logic for image-to-ASCII conversion.
• nothings/stb：Lightweight C image processing tool.