ASCII art refers to the artistic medium created primarily through the use of computer technology. ASCII art is commonly used for presentation purposes. In order to create this form of art, one needs to utilize a fixed-width font as compared to a variable-width font which is what is commonly used now in most document processing programs such as Microsoft Word.
Beginnings of ASCII Art
ASCII art became extremely popular since the later part of the 1960s when Kenneth Knowlton of Bell Labs created some of the oldest samples of ASCII art as part of his collaboration with Leon Harmon in 1966 in the “Studies in Perception I.”
ASCII art was developed primarily due to the fact that printers that were being used during this time did not have the capacity to print out graphics the way how modern printers do so today. As such, the graphics created through ASCII art were used as a means to replace graphic marks commonly used during that time.
Even today, many web developers and editors still use ASCII art as a means to mark certain division in their work and to provide a sense of ownership for their html codes and other materials developed.
Creating ASCII Art through Text Editors
The most common method of creating ASCII art is through the use of a text editor such as the Notepad from scratch. Nowadays, there are now special programs that have been developed such as TheDraw and ACiDDraw that allows you to create ASCII art more easily. These special text editor programs assign a particular character to each and every key on the keyboard. These programs are commonly run using MS-DOS. Other programs utilize the function keys on the keyboard for the assignment of the characters while allowing the creator of the ASCII art to utilize the remaining keys on the keyboard for the ASCII art creation. Currently, the only ASCII art editor that is currently run using Microsoft Windows XP is PabloDraw.
As a development of HTML and CSS style editors, ASCII conversion programs are now able to quantize full RGB color space resulting to the creation of colored ASCII images.
Convert Images to ASCII text | Convert Images to ASCII characters
Image to Text Conversion
Apart from the development of text editor programs, there are now some programs that are able to convert .jpg images into text ASCII art through vector quantization. These programs create these ASCII art images by simply converting the image into grayscale with an 8-bit precision or less. The program then assigns a character for each value created.
Nice Idea to express yourself in ASCII pics
Good evening, sir!
I’m conducting a study about ASCII art conversion and I want to know what’s the process behind the pixel to ASCII character conversion. How am I gonna recognize that a specific grayscale is equivalent a specific character. I wish to know the relation between the pixels and the ASCII characters.
Thank you!