ASCII Art Generator

Art comes in different shapes and sizes. There are all those famous pictures and sculptures keeping museums alive, there’s that ambiguous type of randomness no one really understand, and there’s there’s ASCII. Although mainly a component of computer programming, applications like ASCII Art Generator can turn it into a brush for geeks.

Sure enough, the application looks like it’s about to take you through a setup process, but the location can also be a thumb drive, because it doesn’t rely on any system registries to function, thus can be used on other computers as well.

With the main window up you might want to decide on the picture you want to convert into ASCII art. Unfortunately, you need to work with the built-in browse dialog to load pictures, because dragging them over the main window has no effect. Supported file formats aren’t abundant, but you do get to work with popular image formats, being enough to let you load almost all kinds of pictures you have on your PC.

The only other control there is apart from the path field is a slider which decides the fate of the output file. The more you move the slider to the left, the smaller the size of the image, and number of characters used. Sliding it to the right makes the image larger, but also uses more characters, and distributes them better across the canvas, so more details are engulfed.

At the press of a button, the application’s main window becomes filled with an abundance of characters, all aligned to represent the image you initially load. Resemblance is impressive, especially if you decide to configure the slider for maximum size, and quality respectively.

The application lets you save the creation to file, either under TXT or HTML files. You’re free to directly copy a portion, or the entire code to clipboard, and insert it directly in other fields, or even share online.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that ASCII Art Generator might not come with a large variety of features, such as options to manually create the list of characters to use, but with a single size and quality slider, the output manages to resemble the original picture, deserving at least a try overall.