

Asciifi - an ASCII art converter for a more civilized age - ChrisArchitect
http://asciifi.com/

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zachwill
Haha, nice — I'm the developer if anyone has any questions (it's using a
canvas element to convert images/data URIs to ASCII art).

Also, here's a link to the Github repo: <https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi>

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a3_nm
I wonder which algorithm you're using? From very quick testing, it looks like
you're picking characters to represent various grayscale values, but I'm not
sure that you're taking the shape of the characters into account like other
converters do.

~~~
zachwill
I used a combination of Tab Atkins' and the MooTools ASCII art
(<https://github.com/khrome/MooAsciiArt.js>) algorithms. The four ASCII
options came from those two libraries, as well (I played around with the
values on various pictures until I found ones that I thought worked the best).

You can also take a look at the Asciify and AsciiCharacter classes in the
CoffeeScript file
([https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi/blob/master/static/js/ap...](https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi/blob/master/static/js/application.coffee)).

~~~
a3_nm
OK, and it seems that those algorithms only take the grayscale into account.

Compare <http://paste.fulltxt.net/:gh> (your output) with
<http://paste.fulltxt.net/h-,:wiS> (aalib's output). This probably isn't the
best choice of image, but you can still see how aalib approximates the edges
of the drawing with all sort of characters.

~~~
starwed
>you can still see how aalib approximates the edges of the drawing with all
sort of characters.

Wonder if that makes any sense for video, though?

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exDM69
I don't consider auto generated ASCII figures (from aalib or libcaca or
similar) to be art. To me, art implies there is an artist behind the work of
art or the technique used to generate it.

Real artists do their ASCII art 7 bits at a time.

~~~
morsch
In that case the developer of the converter (library) is the artist. I'm sure
there's a lot of creative input involved in auto-converting a raster image
into an ASCII figure.

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bane
Real artists work in ANSI

<http://sixteencolors.net/>

<http://artscene.textfiles.com/acid/>

<http://artscene.textfiles.com/ice/>

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wingerlang
It is not very often you hear that song out in the wild. Nice.

For anyone interested it is called "fetts vette"

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afc
I thought the opposite: ugh, it has some shitty (for my taste) music, lets
just close it. :-/

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comex
The site declaims "crappy PHP scripts", yet it is broken for me (on Safari
5.1.1) :)

There are two copies of the video:
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1237941/Screen%20Shot%202011-11-28%2...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1237941/Screen%20Shot%202011-11-28%20at%209.00.44%20PM.png)

~~~
zachwill
Just pushed a change to the way the video is embedded — hopefully that takes
care of the bug.

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aculver
Uploaded my favorite photo of our 12 week old daughter in the hopes that I
could stuff it into the repo of some new project. When attempting to adjust
the line width, Chrome went "Aw, Snap!"

Would love to see this again when all the kinks are worked out.

~~~
alexhaefner
Sometimes, as a web developer, you have no consistent way to diagnose these
issues. We found an issue using drag and drop uploads on one of our sites
where if you uploaded the same image in chrome, one after another, it would
crash. So I wouldn't give all the flak to the developer, as it might be
chrome.

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jasonkester
Why the #eee on #fff color scheme? It took me a long time to realize that the
white blur in the scroll area was changing, and that if I highlighted it it
looked like an image.

Turn up the contrast so we can see it!

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burgerbrain
I am having a hard time understanding the purpose of the video on that page...

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thirsteh
Did you notice the contents of the text box change while the video is playing?

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burgerbrain
I did not, my browser window was not large enough to view both at once. Even
so, this strikes me as a very strange use of a flash video.

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jalada
It automatically scrolls down once you start playing the video.

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burgerbrain
Well, that much it does not do in my browser.

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atomicdog
Hmm, it would be interesting to try to use this to generate ascii heightmaps
for games out of images.

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brianxq3
props on the mc chris!

