J I T A C - Image to ASCII Converter (c) 2001 by Konrad Rieck - http://www.roqe.org/jitac - ------------------------------------------------------------------ - Introduction Jitac is an image to ASCII converter written in Java. Yes, you guessed right, this is a cute console application that converts high-quality images into oldschool ASCII art. If you find this idea ridicilous, well, better don't read on. - How it works Jitac reads a source image that can have one of the following formats: GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PICT, Photoshop, BMP, Targa, ICO, CUR, Sunraster, XBM, XPM and PCX. Jitac also reads in a font which can be chosen from a list of integrated fonts or loaded from a BDF font file. The result of the image to ASCII conversion strongly depends on the chosen font. Images rendered with a font and displayed with another font may look really weird. Before the conversion some filters and optional features can be applied to the source image, e.g. inversion, resizing/scaling, gamma correction. The conversion is done by dividing the image into blocks that have equal size and whose dimensions match the charakter dimensions. For each block the charakter is chosen that best matches the pixels inside the block. Features such as noise or rounding (often used in neural networks) can be used to improve conversion quality. By default Jitac uses all visible ASCII charakters in the range 32-126, but Jitac also allows using different ranges or even a specified set of charakters for converting an image, e.g. the set " .o0O". - Installation and execution Actually there is no big kind of installation, just copy the Jitac Jar Archive to a folder and you are ready. You can now execute Jitac by running the following command in this directory: java -jar jitac.jar You can also obtain the source at http://www.roqe.org/jitac. - Commandline options -c Keep coloured source image. By default Jitac uses a grayscaled copy of the source image. Working on the coloured source image may increase conversion quality. -h Print help. -i Invert source image. Usefull if converting for a white on black screen, e.g. old BBX systems. -v Be verbose during conversion. -V Print version and copyright information. -r Round input vectors to 0 or 1. By default Jitac uses values in the range of 0 to 1, rounding the input vectors increases contrast of the source image. -g Apply gamma value to the source image. If you are converting photos it is often necessary to adjust the gamma value. The default gamma value is 1.0 -n Add noise to weight vectors. By default Jitac doesnt't add any noise. By adding noise the conversion processes gets more fuzzy, this increases conversion quality if the source image contains a lot of gradients. -s x Resize source image to geomertry x. -S x Scale width by and height by . -o Write ASCII image to . By default Jitac prints the ASCII images to standard output. -w Scale the source image so that the ASCII image width is characters. A useful option for creating ASCII art in terminals or mails that have a default character width, in most cases 80. -l Load a BDF font from URL , e.g. file:fonts/test.bdf. The Xfree package contains a lot of BDF fonts. -L Print a list of all integrated fonts. Most common fonts are part of Jitac. -f Load an intergrated font. See -L. By default Jitac uses the font "courier10" which is typically used on webpages and postscript printouts. -x - Use characters from to . Values must be integers. By default Jitac uses all visible ASCII characters, range 32-126. -X Use only characters from the string for conversion. Be sure to escape problematic characters such as backslash. - Credits Jitac has been written by Konrad Rieck. Jitac makes use of Jimi, the Java Image Manipulation Interface provided by Sun Microsystems. See the file Jimi-License for license information. GetOpt routines have been written by Aaron M. Renn.