Converting JPEG Images to ASCII Art text
(picture) in Microsoft Windows (2000 / XP / Vista / 7)
A friend of mine, just mentioned about a program
ASCIIPic - capable of
converting graphic images in JPEG to plain text ASCII in
Microsoft Windows OSes.
Yesterday I blogged about
caca-utils (img2txt) - console tool to convert picture graphics to
plain text ASCII , so knowing of the Windows freeware
ASCIIPic existence catched my attention and I decided to
give it a try to get idea what is situation with
Images to ASCII
text convertion in Windows? :).
1. Generating ASCII from JPEG images with ASCII Pic
As I don't have a
Microsoft Windows OS at hand, I downloaded
it and run it on my Debian notebook with
WINE (Wine Is Not
an Emulator) MS-Windows emulator.
For my surprise the program run succesfuly its GUI interface and
worked pretty smooth even emulated on Linux.
As of time of writting, the latest version of the freeware program
available is 2.0. You see in above screenshot the program is pretty
intutive to use. You select an
Input file, an
Output
file and you're ready to Process the image to TXT.
One small note to make here is the program couldn't recognize as
Input files images in PNG or GIF formats, it seems the only image
formats the program recognizes as input are JPEG and BMP.
The converted images to ASCII results are quite unsatisfactory, I
tried converting few pictures originally in size
1024x768
but the produced ASCII was messy huge (the program didn't
automatically set height / width dimensions to 60x80 and therefore,
when I revied the produced pictures, they were very ugly and hardly
readable. It could be the same image looks better if reviewed in
MS-Windows Notepad but I seriously doubt that ...
I thought some improvement to the produced ASCII image might be
possible from the app options so I played around with the
Zoom,
Negation, Brightness and Monochrome options, none of them had a
drastic change on the output. Using any of the program options
didn't make the output TXT "image" to look closer riginal
JPEGs..
ASCII
Pic official website contains a number of other tiny tools,
like
WinKill and
RemoteShut, however most of the
tools are already too obslete and useless just like
ASCII
Pic
If I have to compare
ASCIIPic produced ASCII Images to
libcaca's Linux img2txt, asciipic's ASCII images are a piece
of crap.
2. jp2a command line tool image to ASCII generator
As of time of writting a good alternative program I found for
Windows is
jp2a
jp2a is a
free GPL-ed software available for all
major operating system architectures Linux, BSD, Mac OS X,
Windows.
jp2a is a command line tool and lacks any GUI interface but
if compared to
ASCII Pic the output ASCII image is
awesome.
jp2a
Windows binary can be downloaded from here , also I've made
a
mirror of windows jp2a bin in case if it disappears here
3. ASCII Generator 2 (asc2gen) - Windows GUI Images to ASCII
generator
ASC 2 Gen is actually the best I can find program to
convert images to ascii in Win as of time of writting.
Just like
img2txt it generates pretty decent looking text
images.
ASC2Gen failed to run emulated on my Linux host with
wine
version 1.0.1, hence to test it I used a a Windows host
via teamviewer.
Below are few screenshots illustrating most of the options
ASCII2GEN provides:
asc2gen penguins in inverted color set (black color text
background)
ASC2GEN flipped backhed generated image to ASCII
Picture to ASCII text converted with ASCII colors
ascii2gen dithering level option shot
asc2gen contrast / brigthness atune shot
asc2gen save as options shot
Something else nice is it supports a lot of image file formats as
input including (BMP and GIF) images.
I've also made a
mirror of asc2gen
v. 2.0.0 here
While researching online, I found pplenty of other
Image to
ASCII geneartors, however as I didn't tested them I can't say
if there are a better ones.
Anyways I will be happy to hear if anyone knows other good ASCII
generator alternative progs for Winblows?