ASCII ART is a digital drawing technique in which the image is represented by symbols or letters of the alphabet. ASCCI stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" and is, in fact, the character set used by computer keyboards all over the world. Converting an image into letters and symbols therefore means recreating it with the characters typed through the computer keyboard .
Drawing using symbols such as letters and punctuation or typically computer symbols is a job in which you need a lot of imagination and a lot of patience.
READ ALSO: Turn photos into portraits of text and words
Art Text or ASCII art can be done using any text editor for your computer such as Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit.
Surely the experts of this technique use more advanced word processing programs that allow you to align the characters and superimpose them more easily however, as here I like to make anyone accessible to anyone, we see in this article how to convert an image or a photo to letters and symbols using automatic programs.
Here we see two web applications that can be used immediately, without downloading anything and a small program.
ASCII Art Generator quickly converts any photo into ASCII letters and symbols . After selecting and uploading any photo from the computer, the site goes to select the characters in order to convert the images into text. After the first conversion, you are asked to enter any nickname that gives the project its name. The next phase proposes to customize the ASCII image with the use of a different set of characters and changing the brightness which, in this case, means increasing or decreasing the intensity, the number and the heaviness of the symbols and letters used.
When you are satisfied with the result, you can download the image as a text file for your computer, a .txt text file that opens with the notepad and that can be copied and pasted into emails or as a forum signature.
Text-Image is a more powerful online application that not only converts images into written text, but also offers several varieties: HTML, ASCII and Matrix .
The ASCII conversion is very similar to that of the previous site, the image will be converted into ASCII art. Unlike Photo2Text, it is not possible to specify a different character set, but there are other options that compensate for this lack. In addition to black text on a white background, you can also choose the width of the image, the color to be used as the background, the color of the text and the contrast. Matrix conversion is similar to ASCII with green text on a black screen, with the same graphics used by the famous film.
Most interesting of all is the conversion to HTML because the image can be transformed into a colored text file or in grayscale.
To these two websites you can add a very small open source and free program, which does not require installation, very simple to use, which is used to convert normal images into ASCII text made of symbols and letters .
Through ASCII Generator it is possible to manage the contrast and brightness of the converted image which translates into an increase in characters used with a greater recurrence of larger and more visible symbols. With this little software it is possible not only to convert the image but also to change the characters and learn how to create ASCII Art even from scratch . Here too you can choose the character set to use, you can color it and you can decide the colors of the background and the text.
To learn more about ASCII art, to learn or just to see creations made by experts in this digital design sector, I can recommend some websites.
1) Chris.com
3) ASCII ART Dictionary
4) Ascii World
