ASCII-fying Paul Ford
I remember fondly printing out 132-column line printer ASCII drawings back in the old days. In a fit of nostalgic whimsy, I’ve put together a quick program to produce ASCII art from bitmap images in Racket:
(require 2htdp/image) (define ascii-by-density (string->list "@%#*+=-:. ")) (define (choose-char cl w x y) (let* ([pixel (list-ref cl (+ x (* y w)))] [peak (max (color-red pixel) (color-green pixel) (color-blue pixel))]) (if (zero? peak) (last ascii-by-density) (let ([c (round (- (* (length ascii-by-density) (/ peak 255)) 1))]) (if (positive? c) (list-ref ascii-by-density c) (first ascii-by-density)))))) (define (write-asciified-bitmap bm filename) (with-output-to-file filename (lambda () (let ([w (image-width bm)] [cl (image->color-list bm)]) (for ([y (range (image-height bm))]) (for ([x (range w)]) (display (choose-char cl w x y))) (display "\n")))))) (define paul-ford (bitmap/url "https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_200_200/AAEAAQAAAAAAAApxAAAAJDcwZDhlYmM0LTlhNzUtNDJjOC05MjI4LTRiZjU3N2Q0ZjBhZQ.jpg")) (write-asciified-bitmap paul-ford "ford.txt")
Demonstrated here using this photo of my friend Paul Ford:

▲ Paul Ford, photo by Paul, ASCII by Racket
I hope he doesn’t mind.
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This entry is part of Jack Rusher’s archive, originally published October 9th, 2014, in Berlin.