Simple ASCII Art Generator

Sajjitha Gunawardana

4.06/5 (5 votes)

Jul 4, 2007

CPOL

70569

621

Uses less than 25 lines of code to convert a given picture to an equivalent ASCII picture

Download source - 191.4 KB

Introduction

This is a very simple program to convert a given picture into an ASCII Art of 1s & 0s. The output ASCII Image is saved in *.html format.

Using the Code

The code first reads the picture specified by the user into a bitmap object. Then it scans through each pixel of the image and converts it into its equivalent HTML tag, and saves the value into the output.html file.

The final output will look similar to the picture shown above.

StreamWriter sw = File.CreateText(outputPath);
Color color;
 
//Start of HTML file
sw.Write("<html> \n <body > \n <pre style=\"font: 10px/3px monospace;\">");

Random ran = new Random();
for (int y = 0; y < bmp.Height; y=y+3)
{
    for (int x = 0; x < bmp.Width; x=x+3)
    {
        int random = ran.Next(2);
        color = bmp.GetPixel(x, y);
        //write the HTML tag corresponding to the pixel color 
        //value of random will be either 1 or 0
        sw.Write("<span style=\"color: #{0:X2}{1:X2}{2:x2};\">{3}</span>", 
            (int)color.R, (int)color.G, (int)color.B, random);
    }

    sw.WriteLine("<br>");
}

//End of HTML file
sw.Write("</body>\n</html>");

sw.Close();

Note that we are using a random number generator to produce either 1 or 0 randomly.

int random = ran.Next(2);

Points of Interest

This is a very simple approach to creating color ASCII art. It will be quite simple to modify the above program to output other characters as well (rather than the 1 & 0 used here).

A sample picture created with a modified version of the above program could be found here.

Note: Sometimes, it may take several seconds for the background image to load.