Hanziart

Hanzi (Chinese characters) version of asciiart.

ASCII art uses monospaced keyboard characters, originally limited to those encoded by the ASCII standard, in place of pixels to draw raster images. The intensity of a given pixel is approximated by the visual density of the ASCII character.

Chinese characters, or hanzi, also known by their Japanese name kanji, present an even wider variety of characters to use for ASCII art.

For an example, see apple40.txt. Best viewed in a text editor with line-wrapping turned off.

As a proxy for their visual density, we shall use the stroke count of a character. Stroke count data are provided in Unihan database produced by the Unicode consortium.

Source data

You will need to download Unihan data (zip archive) from Unicode. The file we need is Unihan_DictionaryLikeData.txt within the Unihan.zip archive.

Dependencies

Written in Python3. Requires the following libraries: scikit-image (skimage), scipy, matplotlib, numpy, argparse, csv, random, re, collections.

Usage

python3 hanziart.py --image photo.jpeg
python3 hanziart.py --image photo.jpeg --gradelevel 2 # Use characters up to grade level 2
python3 hanziart.py --help # Help message

The only required argument is the path to the image file. Assumes that Unihan_DictionaryLikeData.txt is in the current folder by default. Use --help option to see all options and their defaults.

To do list

Some ideas for future development

• Measure the visual density of each character, instead of using stroke count as a proxy.
• Match the visual pattern of a character to the image, e.g. characters with strong diagonal elements better approximate part of an image with diagonal texture.
• Use n-grams from actual written text, to better simulate readable text.