ASCII art generator with Python3

Today, it is going to be less technical post. Some time ago I found my self getting into a problem to generate some instruction for CLI tool. What I was looking for is a simple way to generate fine ASCII art text just from string. So, I would like to show you a two ASCII art generators with Python3 right now. First is a simple generator from text input and second, a bit more completed from image.

As I said before, the simplest way to convert text to ASCII output is using figlet. There is a nice port called pyfiglet which make it possible to generate beautiful art just from text input just from console.

$ pip3 install pyfiglet

And just run it. The tool accepts a font family as input parameter:

$ result = pyfiglet.figlet_format("CyberTechTalk", font = "crazy")

And here we go!

Another way is leveraging Pillow Image Library. This is a bit more laborious process.

1. First we have to load image and resize it:

import PIL.Image

def main():
    
    image = PIL.Image.open(path)
    
def resize(image, newwidth = 100):
    initwidth, initheight = image.size
    newheight = newwidth * initheight / initwidth
    return image.resize((newwidth, newheight))

2. After, convert image to grey scale:

def converttoascii(image):
    pixels = image.getdata()
    asciistr = "";
    for pixel in pixels:
        asciistr += ASCII_CHARS[pixel//25];
    return asciistr

greyscaleimage = image.convert("L")
asciistr = converttoascii(greyscale_image)

3. Once we get the ASCII string of the image, we need to split the string based on the image’s width and save it in a file:

for i in range(0, len(asciistr), width):
    img+= asciistr[i:i+width] + "\n"
    #save the string to a file
    with open(output.txt", "w") as f:
        f.write(img);

This method allows to map any image to ASCII text and store to a text file.

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