💾 Archived View for belago.org › ascii-art › how-to › 00-introduction.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:25:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
ASCII art is a technique that strings together characters of the ASCII standard for graphical representation.
The ASCII character set has 95 printable characters:
!"#$%&'()*+,-./
0123456789:;<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyz{|}~
If you are a purist, you ONLY use these characters. The most alluring non-ASCII character you may want to use is the degree symbol but I encourage you do find ways around it because this is what the technique is about: navigating limitations.
There are three main types of ASCII art:
Out of the three, greyscale pixels will yield the most "photorealistic" results but since they are usually computer-generated there is really no skill or technique to this. You just convert an image to greyscale and asign characters to the pixel value. A character ramp will sort ASCII character based on their density (how much of the area is filled) and then assigns them to pixel bins.
Filled shapes are great for single color shapes and logos. They can als be computer generated.
This leaves us with my preferred style of ASCII art which this tutorial is about: contour drawing. There is no reliable computatoinal shortcut for this as far as I'm aware. The artist often has to make creative decisions to work within the limits of the ASCII character set.