ASCII ART Generator
I fondly remember the days of DOS, ASCII art was at it’s zenith. Since GUI has become the norm, I’ll admit I don’t tinker with ASCII as much as I used to but it’s great to see someone still working in this classic medium.
Jonathan Ford recently released a PHP 5 class that will take a jpg image and convert it into ASCII art. This is one of those toys that will keep you amused on those long conference calls that Monday mornings are bound to be full of. The class has options for the final size and the output quality. Both expressed as a single digit without a scale for reference so you’ll have to kill a few bytes experimenting to get the effect you want.
The demo page of this cool little bandwidth sponge allows you to submit a URL of a picture (hint, flickr.com is full of them) and generate art from it.
To be honest though, this is not traditional ASCII art, Jonathan’s code renders in HTML, manipulating the style of each character/pixel to achieve the desired result. Nonetheless, the result is just short of stunning.
So go ahead, take your on-line family photo album and head on over to ASCII Art Generator, staff meeting will be over before you know it.
=C=
p.s. it is so nice to see someone wholly unconcerned with licenses and confident in his own programming skills. Jonathan has released the code for this cool toy as Public Domain with the charge to “edit, copy and distribute as you see fit.” So quit wasting his bandwidth, setup your own copy.
Comments
On a related note, always nice to find a page that crashes firefox! Might have been the 61000 access warnings that the tidy validator extension threw up when I got it to produce a colour image. :)