ASCII-art-rs

A simple Rust commandline program to make ASCII art. It uses Nannou and so requires a desktop.

Usage

Usage is as follows: ascii_art_rs.exe -i img.jpg -o img_ascii.png -s 10000 --height 1000 --chars abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

-i <FILE>                 The path to the input image.
-o <FILE>                 The path where the ASCII art will be saved. [default: ascii_art.png]
-s <NUMBER>               How many letters to place. [default: 500]
    --width <NUMBER>      The width of the output image.
    --height <NUMBER>     The height of the output image. [default: 1000]
    --chars <CHARACTERS>  The characters you want to be used in output image. (Defaults to visible ASCII characters)
    --colour              Uses accurate colours when specified, instead of grayscale.
-h, --help                Print help
-V, --version             Print version

Usage Notes

The only required argument is -i.

--colour takes no values, it's a boolean flag.

The width/height arguments are mutually exclusive. This is because the aspect ratio of the image is preserved, so the height is dependent on the width and vice versa.

Example Output

This was obtained with the following command, using this image (687x1024 version) as input: ascii_art_rs.exe -i mona_lisa.jpg -s 15000 --height 1024 -o example.png

TODO

• If the output width/height is larger than the desktop width/height, scale the window size so it fits entirely on the desktop.
• Add an argument for accurate colours, as opposed to grayscale.
• Add a non-GUI argument for true commandline use.
• Add arguments for minimum and maximum character sizes.
• Add an argument to place characters in grids/cells, rather than random placement.
• Add an argument to output a video by capturing all frames
• Set a more reasonable default value for steps, so that it varies depending on the image size and stops output images from being too sparse/dense.