What ASCII Art Does

Yan divides the image into a grid. For each cell, it measures the average brightness, then picks a character whose visual density matches. Dark = sparse character (`.`, `,`). Bright = dense character (`#`, `@`).

ASCII Art Algorithm Diagram

Why It Still Looks Cool

ASCII art predates the JPEG. Print it to a dot-matrix and you'd have a 1985 demoscene title card. But it's also a forced abstraction — you stop seeing the photo as a photo and start seeing it as marks on a page.

Type is shape. ASCII is the shape of light.

Parameters

Block Size (4–16 px)
The cell each character represents.

4–6: detailed, almost photographic

8–10: classic ASCII look, readable

12–16: chunky, posterized

Color Mode

Off: pure green-on-black terminal classic

On: characters keep the original cell color

Edge Weight (0–100%)
Boosts characters along high-contrast edges. Higher = stronger outlines.

Dither Amount (0–100%)
Adds randomness to character pick. Prevents banding in smooth gradients.

Dual Layer
Renders both background tint and foreground glyph. Off = flat. On = depth.

White Fallback
Swaps the default black canvas for white. Color-on-white reads more like print, less like a terminal.

Region vs Global

Yan ships ASCII Art in two scopes:

Regional (default): only the bright detected areas turn into characters. The rest of the photo stays as pixels. Makes the ASCII zones pop as glitch insets.

Global: the whole image becomes characters. Pure ASCII portrait.

Regional mode is governed by the same brightness detection used for the other glitch modes — pixels in the configured brightness band become candidate regions. Global mode skips detection entirely and processes every cell.

Presets

Green Terminal: phosphor green on black. The classic.

Amber CRT: amber on black. 1980s minicomputer.

Cyber Neon: high-contrast color, magenta/cyan bias.

Paper Type: black ink on warm white. Print-like.

Matrix Rain: pure katakana-style cascade.

Good Subjects

Portraits: faces ASCII-ify surprisingly well — the eyes anchor it

High-contrast scenes: shadows and highlights give the algorithm something to chew on

Text and logos: type rendered as type. Meta-cool.

Architecture: lines map naturally to characters

What to Avoid

Busy, low-contrast images: everything becomes the same character

Tiny important details: block size will eat them

Combinations

ASCII + CRT: terminal-on-terminal. Layered analog cosplay.

ASCII + RGB Shift: chromatic aberration on characters. Tom Clancy hacker scene.

ASCII + Block Jitter: corrupted teletext.

The Idea

ASCII art is the original compression: a million pixels into a few hundred characters. Lossy, but the loss is the point.