Convert images to text (ASCII art)
Recently, whilst messing with sprites and the Grrr framework, I got thinking about better graphics for games.
As PowerShell is very slow at doing console atomic write operations, a game should really have fewer, larger sprites. I then thought about ASCII art, and wouldn’t it be great if PowerShell could convert existing images (jpg, png) and produce lines of text for use with Grrr’s create-image function.
So my morning’s work is a PowerShell script that does just that.
You can download it here: convert-image2text.ps1 (as a text file)
(If you’re reading this from the RSS feed, the link may be broken - open the blog page if so)
Unfortunately, it’s only monochrome. I had a lot of trouble getting a reasonable conversion of RGB or HSV to the console’s limited colour palette and character range, so in the end, I removed it.
The script uses System.Drawing and demonstrates one (a good?) way of adding an assembly to PowerShell.
Usage:
./convert-image2text.ps1 imagefile
[ -maxwidth nchars ] [-palette ascii | shade | bw ]
Here’s an example using the default -palette ascii option:
Here’s the same with the -palette shade option:
Both are from this source image (click to see full size):
On 08 Jan 2007 at 6:50 am, Rob Farley said:
The soapy frog does ASCII Art in PowerShell…
Of course the idea is the same as Unix’s AALib , but what’s so cool is how little code it takes to do…
On 08 Jan 2007 at 8:06 pm, ymasur said:
hmmm… I get an div by 0 error. The $imgwidth, forced gives nothing more. What type of image is supported? I tried a jpg one.
Regards,
//Yves
On 08 Jan 2007 at 8:25 pm, adrian said:
@ymasur - i’ve used some png and jpg images.
the image linked to the monalisa thumbnail for one.
what image(s) are you using?
On 09 Jan 2007 at 4:12 pm, Richy_Rich said:
I get this if you don’t put the explicit path to the input file. i.e.
./convert-image2text.ps1 blong.jpg
fails with divide by zero error
./convert-image2text.ps1 c:\blong.jpg
works
On 09 Jan 2007 at 4:56 pm, adrian said:
Oh yes, so do I.
Yet more weirdness, akin to what I was speaking about in gotcha 2 at http://ps1.soapyfrog.com/2007/01/09/text-and-path-gotchas/
I’ll figure it out and repost the script.
On 10 Jan 2007 at 11:05 am, adrian said:
I fixed it and updated the post to point to the new script.
I needed to add this:
$path=(resolve-path -erroraction “stop” $path).path