Java tool to display an ASCII representation of an image
It takes an existing image and replaces all the pixels to ASCII characters.
- Run
java -jar pic2ascii.jar <filename>in your terminal, replacing<filename>with the actual name of your file. - When prompted, enter 0 (benchmark), 1 (single thread), or 2 (multi thread).
- When prompted, enter a scale value (higher value = smaller result).
- When prompted, enter a character to represent pixels
The first image is the original image (a mammoth). The second image is a converted image with a scale of 3 and using the M character. If you zoom in on the second image, you can see all the M's that make up the image.
Yes. Import it into your project, then add one of these lines of code:
BufferedImage image1 = new P2A().getImage(String filename, String character, int scale, boolean multi);
BufferedImage image2 = new P2A().getImage(File file, String character, int scale, boolean multi);
BufferedImage image3 = new P2A().getImage(BufferedImage image, String character, int scale, boolean multi);
Any of those will return a BufferedImage object. The 'multi' parameter is whether or not to multithread.
- Depending on the size of your image for low scale values, you may need to increase the amount of RAM available to the Java VM. A 16 megapixel image with a scale of 1 used 5.8 Gigabytes of RAM during testing, for example.
- The only characters the program is capable of saving are those available on a standard US keyboard. Characters with accents or other languages are not supported (though, if you want to contribute more characters, get a pull request and we'll make it happen).
- If your system is slow, this program will take a very long time for large images and/or low scale values.
- If you are using a large image with low scale values, the resulting file could have a much higher file size than the original.
- Some characters won't save in filenames due to operating system / file system restrictions. In these cases, a random file name will be generated.
Read the License for any information on modifying or using it. You can pretty much do what you want, all I ask is that I (Joshua Moore) get quoted as the original author, and that you do not add payment or ads.