ASCII Art Generator

This page generates ASCII art from an uploaded image. There was an AQA GCSE Computer Science coursework task that required students to compress and decompress ASCII art using Run-Length Encoding. That made me wonder how you could create ASCII art in the first place. Could it be as simple as sorting the ASCII character into order of "density", and then using the right symbol according to how dark the pixel is? Yes - it seems to be!

When you upload an image, it is first re-sized to the selected width and the red, green and blue values extracted. The average of the three values is then used as an index into a string of characters in this order: $@B%8&WM#*oahkbdpqwmZO0QLCJUYXzcvunxrjft/\|()1{}[]?-_+~<>i!lI;:,"^`. . A fixed-width/monospace typeface is used to ensure that all characters are the same size and the pixels are aligned.

The image is displayed using colour by default, but you can un-tick the Colour checkbox for more traditional ASCII art. Pixels in images are often square, but text characters aren't - some ASCII art generators only sample alternate rows of pixels, but here I've changed the line-height to condense the rows.

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