ASCII (short for American Standard Code of Information Interchange) might seem something that came about in the early days of computer bulletin board systems of the late 70s and early 80s, but one could also assume (or argue) that even typewriters were used to create visual art way before that.
ASCII art is not something most us are exposed to in today’s world of the Internet. Nevertheless, there are a lot of mediums for ASCII art online and, truth be told, some works are simply amazing (even though, clearly, most of them will probably never reach the fame and glory of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci).
Not into creating ASCII art the old-fashioned way, but you still like the aesthetic? Not a problem, just try Letterpress (formerly known as ASCII Images).
Letterpress is a simple, free and open-source application that allows you to convert images to ASCII characters. Even though the app is capable of doing this, it’s worth noting that it might struggle a bit when it comes to super complex images.
jp2a is at the core of the app. jp2a is a straightforward, open-source ASCII converter engine. It only supports JPEG and PNG, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem since these are two of the most popular image formats currently in use.
Working with Letterpress couldn’t be easier. You just load any photo from your computer into the app (drag and drop is also supported), and press the Open File button, and you should be able to have a clear ASCII result in mere seconds (if the image itself is not overly complicated).
Once this is done, you can choose the width of the ASCII characters from the bottom bar, as well as download the result to a .txt file, as well as copy it directly to your computer’s clipboard.
Even though there’s not much to say about Letterpress in terms of functionality (since everything is so simple), the app does exactly what it says on the tin, and it works great with simple images with very well defined shapes and forms.
