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Comment by zachwill | Hacker News Reader

Haha, nice — I'm the developer if anyone has any questions (it's using a canvas element to convert images/data URIs to ASCII art).

Also, here's a link to the Github repo: https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi

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I wonder which algorithm you're using? From very quick testing, it looks like you're picking characters to represent various grayscale values, but I'm not sure that you're taking the shape of the characters into account like other converters do.

I used a combination of Tab Atkins' and the MooTools ASCII art (https://github.com/khrome/MooAsciiArt.js) algorithms. The four ASCII options came from those two libraries, as well (I played around with the values on various pictures until I found ones that I thought worked the best).

You can also take a look at the Asciify and AsciiCharacter classes in the CoffeeScript file (https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi/blob/master/static/js/ap...).

OK, and it seems that those algorithms only take the grayscale into account.

Compare http://paste.fulltxt.net/:gh (your output) with http://paste.fulltxt.net/h-,:wiS (aalib's output). This probably isn't the best choice of image, but you can still see how aalib approximates the edges of the drawing with all sort of characters.

>you can still see how aalib approximates the edges of the drawing with all sort of characters.

Wonder if that makes any sense for video, though?

Great project -- I'd like to have the time for such side-projects

Fun site. But why haven't you written credits to the music?

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