Turn images into ASCII art.

I created this in a weekend attempt to learn some Python beyond the statistical uses I'm familiar with, as one of Robert Heaton's Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners. This probably doesn't follow good practices in all sorts of ways, because I'm still learning what those are.

Webcam usage requires ImageSnap ($ brew install imagesnap) and uses the first camera ($ imagesnap -l) if multiple are installed. The webcam image will be saved as snapshot.jpg.

1. Run the requirements.txt: $ pip install -r requirements.txt
2. Run asciiart.py: $ python asciiart.py -f 'sample.jpg'

You may need to change your font size to see the whole output, or try changing the width with -w [WIDTH].

The following options are supported:

• -f [filename]: Path to image file to process; omit to use webcam.
• -c: Render in 256-bit color against black background if your environment supports it
• -m: Method for calculating pixel density. (Default='lightness')
  • 'mean': Average of pixel red, green, and blue values
  • 'lightness': Average of minimum and maximum of red, green, and blue values
  • 'luminosity': Weighted average of red, green, and blue values (0.21R + .72G + .07B) to account for human perception
• -w [WIDTH]: Width of ASCII image before applying width scalar (see below). (Default=80)
• -s [SCALE]: Width scalar of 1, 2, or 3 to compensate for the fact that characters are taller than they are wide. Doubles or triples each character printed to the terminal. (Default=2)

Justin Reppert

Script was written on Python 3.7.4

Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.