img2text

A lightweight module to generate colorful ascii art from images

To install img2text:

pip install img2text

How To Use

Let's use the python logo as reference:

To generate an ascii image

from img2text import img_to_ascii

ascii_img = img_to_ascii('data/python.png', width=80)
print(ascii_img)

We obtain the following:

Adding Color

We can customize this further by adding color (to be shown in the console):

from img2text import img_to_ascii

ascii_img = img_to_ascii('data/python.png', width=80, colorful=True)
print(ascii_img)

We obtain the following:

Customizing Output

We can reverse the intensity of the image by setting reverse to True

from img2text import img_to_ascii

ascii_img = img_to_ascii('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hmiladhia/img2text/master/data/python.png', width=80, colorful=True, reverse=True)
print(ascii_img)

We obtain the following:

We can get a slightly brighter image by adding the bright option which sets the characters to bold:

from img2text import img_to_ascii

ascii_img = img_to_ascii('data/python.png', width=80, colorful=True, reverse=True, bright=True)
print(ascii_img)

We obtain the following:

You can also change the character set by providing a custom string of characters that increase in intensity:

from img2text import img_to_ascii

chars = r" ░▒▓█"

ascii_img = img_to_ascii('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hmiladhia/img2text/master/data/python.png', width=80, colorful=True, bright=True, chars=chars)
print(ascii_img)

We obtain the following:

Exporting ASCII image to a file

It's also possible to export the result to a text file, so you can print its content using the cat command for example To do this all you need to do is to write the content to a file:

from img2text import img_to_ascii

ascii_img = img_to_ascii('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hmiladhia/img2text/master/data/python.png', width=80, colorful=True)

with open('logo.ascii', 'w') as f:
    f.write(ascii_img + '\n')

or using the CLI:

img2text -cw 80 -o logo.ascii data/python.png

Additional Options

• Customize the width and height by providing the number of columns/lines to use
• Customize the aspect ratio by providing ar_coef coefficient. The default value is set to 2.4 but depending on the console you are using it might be interesting to try out values from [2, 3]
• You can add a Background Color by setting bg_color to one of the following values:
  • BLACK
  • RED
  • GREEN
  • YELLOW
  • BLUE
  • MAGENTA
  • CYAN
  • WHITE