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Advanced image to ASCII art tool & crate written in Rust πŸ¦€πŸš€

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RASCII Logo

Advanced ASCII Art Generator

Usage: rascii [OPTIONS] <FILENAME>

Arguments:
  <FILENAME>  Path to the image

Options:
  -w, --width <WIDTH>      Width of the output image. Defaults to 128 if width and height are not specified
  -H, --height <HEIGHT>    Height of the output image, if not specified, it will be calculated to keep the aspect ratio
  -c, --color              Whether to use colors in the output image
  -i, --invert             Inverts the weights of the characters. Useful for white backgrounds
  -C, --charset <CHARSET>  Characters used to render the image, from transparent to opaque. Built-in charsets: block, emoji, default, russian, slight [default: default]
  -h, --help               Print help
  -V, --version            Print version

Features

  • Available as a crate: RASCII has a very simple API allowing you to use RASCII from your programs without using the system shell.

  • Colored ASCII art generation: RASCII uses ANSI color codes to generate colored ASCII art.

    [!NOTE] Your terminal emulator has to support truecolor (don't worry, almost all modern terminal emulators do).

  • Super efficient colored output: RASCII never repeats the same ANSI color code if it is already active.

    This makes a huge difference in images with little alternating color, up to about 1800% reduction in output size. Woah!

  • Custom dimensions: RASCII allows you to give custom dimensions to the outputted ASCII art while keeping the aspect ratio (unless both dimensions are provided).

  • Custom charsets: RASCII allows you to use custom charsets to generate your ASCII art.

Note

The given charset must go from transparent to opaque.

  • Lots of pre-included charsets.

Installing The CLI

Via Cargo

Note

This is the recommended way of installing the RASCII CLI.

Warning

You must have ~/.cargo/bin/ in your PATH to run rascii directly.

cargo install rascii_art

Manually

Warning

this installation method is discouraged and only works for GNU/Linux or any other POSIX compatible systems!

git clone https://github.com/KoBruhh/RASCII && cd RASCII
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

Using The Crate

Instead of using the unreliable system shell to call RASCII, you can add the rascii_art crate to your project and use it in Rust!

To do so, run cargo add rascii_art to add RASCII to your Cargo project.

Here is a code example:

use rascii_art::{
    render_to,
    RenderOptions,
};
                                                            
fn main() {
    let mut buffer = String::new();
                                                            
    render_to(
        r"/path/to/image.png",
        &mut buffer,
        &RenderOptions::new()
            .width(100)
            .colored(true)
            .charset(&[".", ",", "-", "*", "Β£", "$", "#"]),
    )
    .unwrap();
}

Showcase

Japanese Charset

Emoji Charset

Note

The emoji charset does not guarantee your outputs color will match the color of your image, this is just a coincidence that happened with Ferris.

Chinese Charset

Block Charset

Custom ASCII Charset

You can use the --charset (or -C) CLI option to provide a custom charset to use when generating some ASCII art.

The value of this must option must go from transparent to opaque, like so:

rascii --charset " β–‘β–’β–“β–ˆ" --color ferris.png

Note that a charset similar to the above charset is available as a builtin named block.

Contributors

KoBruhh RGBCube felixonmars fnordpig


Note

There is a python script at repository root that can be used to generate the above contributor ASCII Art.

python contributors.py