asciify

A package to create ASCII art from arbitrary images. This is a work in progress and probably doesn’t have a purpose, but I’m finding it fun.

# devtools::install_github("djnavarro/asciify")
library("asciify")
#> Registered S3 methods overwritten by 'ggplot2':
#>   method         from 
#>   [.quosures     rlang
#>   c.quosures     rlang
#>   print.quosures rlang

The core function in the package is ascii_map, which takes a path to an image file as the input, and returns a tibble converting the image to a character map:

bayes_img <- ascii_data("bayes.png")      # path to the bayes image
bayes_map <- ascii_map(file = bayes_img)  # construct ASCII map
bayes_map
#> # A tibble: 1,404 x 3
#>        x     y label
#>    <int> <int> <chr>
#>  1    44     2 r    
#>  2    45     2 v    
#>  3    46     2 b    
#>  4    47     2 e    
#>  5    48     2 o    
#>  6    41     3 y    
#>  7    42     3 u    
#>  8    43     3 e    
#>  9    44     3 s    
#> 10    45     3 o    
#> # … with 1,394 more rows

In the code chunk above ascii_data is just a convenience function that returns the path to an image file that comes bundled with the package.

The tibble has three variables: x and y specify the location of a character on a grid, and label specifes what character is shown at that location. The package includes a simple plot function that returns a ggplot:

ascii_plot(bayes_map, charsize = 2)

There are a few other handy functions in the package. For instance, you can convert the tibble representation from ascii_map into grid of characters using ascii_grid, which returns a matrix:

bayes_grid <- ascii_grid(bayes_map)
str(bayes_grid)
#>  chr [1:55, 1:94] " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " ...

Once converted to this grid format, you can write it to text file using ascii_text

#ascii_text(bayes_grid, file = "something.txt")

Finally, for no particularly sensible reasion, the package also allows you to write the result to an HTML file that produces a “digital rain” animation.

#ascii_rain(bayes_grid, file = "something.html")