ansifier 0.0.6

A python package to represent static & animated images as text

🅰️🅽⚡️ℹ️🎏💈📧Ⓡ

📜 Table of Contents

• About
• Prerequisites
• Installation
• Usage
• Acknowledgements

🧐 About

ansifier is a python package which exposes a simple interface for converting image files to utf-8 or ascii encoded strings.

At present, ansifier is only able to process image files (as opposed to videos), and can only create its colorful output using ANSI escape sequences, but plans are being made to add HTML/CSS/JS output and potentially other formats.

🛠 Prerequisites

Python 3.10 and higher should run this fine. Older versions of Python 3 may work. 3.9 is especially likely to be okay, but extensive testing has not been done.

Output should work as intended on any modern terminal with true color support, and may work on terminals without this support, albeit with funny looking colors. I've tested on various Linux environments and Windows 10 21H2 and higher, but not on any Macs. It works in virtual consoles which don't have true color support - at some point in the stack the RGB escapes get converted, but I don't know where or how.

Note that ansifier does NOT seem to play nice with bpython, which is a real shame because I love that program. Other similar environments which also make use of ANSI escapes may be similarly disagreeable to ansifier's emissions.

Also note that the CLI provides a -m/--meofetch flag. If you want to use this you have to have neofetch installed and on your PATH so the script can get its output from a subprocess. See the Usage section for more details on the CLI.

📦 Installation

This package is on PyPi - my first ever! pip install ansifier and you should be good to go.

🕹️ Usage

python -m ansifier exposes a command-line interface. The CLI takes an extensive array of arguments which are pretty thoroughly documented in the --help output.

To use ansifier programatically, you can from ansifier import ImageFilePrinter. Take a look at the docstring of the ImageFilePrinter class for how the class is intended to be used, and how you might hack it up in ways that are only somewhat intended.

The CLI takes one argument for each parameter that ImageFilePrinter.\_\_init\_\_ takes, plus a few more. The exception is the array of characters which an ImageFilePrinter instance chooses from while converting an image to text - right now this is fully configurable except that the CLI lacks an argument for it, but it's pretty high on my priority list to add this.

Here it is in action! This video is a little out of date - forgive me, for now. I'll update it soon to reflect the new streamlined installation and usage process (and the new less silly naming scheme).

https://github.com/amminer/ansifier/assets/107884857/3ceab1fb-dbf5-44ef-9421-5e42a34cee66

I'll probably give this the ability to take URLs and put it in a cloud function at some point, but for now I'm a very broke grad student and I don't want to have to worry about having a "make me spend money" button exposed to the internet.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Thanks to the maintainers of:

• Pillow for implementing all those image scaling algorithms
• colorama for dealing with Windows nonsense so I don't have to 😄
• pytest, my beloved
• angr for teaching me how to structure a python package by example (and, on a mostly unrelated note, for creating one of my current favorite pieces of software)
• this cool webpage that I used to generate the title of this document