HN Explorer

27 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.3 ms ] thread
zachwill
Haha, nice — I'm the developer if anyone has any questions (it's using a canvas element to convert images/data URIs to ASCII art).

Also, here's a link to the Github repo: https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi

a3_nm
I wonder which algorithm you're using? From very quick testing, it looks like you're picking characters to represent various grayscale values, but I'm not sure that you're taking the shape of the characters into account like other converters do.
zachwill
I used a combination of Tab Atkins' and the MooTools ASCII art (https://github.com/khrome/MooAsciiArt.js) algorithms. The four ASCII options came from those two libraries, as well (I played around with the values on various pictures until I found ones that I thought worked the best).

You can also take a look at the Asciify and AsciiCharacter classes in the CoffeeScript file (https://github.com/zachwill/asciifi/blob/master/static/js/ap...).

a3_nm
OK, and it seems that those algorithms only take the grayscale into account.

Compare http://paste.fulltxt.net/:gh (your output) with http://paste.fulltxt.net/h-,:wiS (aalib's output). This probably isn't the best choice of image, but you can still see how aalib approximates the edges of the drawing with all sort of characters.

starwed
>you can still see how aalib approximates the edges of the drawing with all sort of characters.

Wonder if that makes any sense for video, though?

stephth
Fun site. But why haven't you written credits to the music?
pace
Great project -- I'd like to have the time for such side-projects
aculver
Uploaded my favorite photo of our 12 week old daughter in the hopes that I could stuff it into the repo of some new project. When attempting to adjust the line width, Chrome went "Aw, Snap!"

Would love to see this again when all the kinks are worked out.

alexhaefner
Sometimes, as a web developer, you have no consistent way to diagnose these issues. We found an issue using drag and drop uploads on one of our sites where if you uploaded the same image in chrome, one after another, it would crash. So I wouldn't give all the flak to the developer, as it might be chrome.
burgerbrain
I am having a hard time understanding the purpose of the video on that page...
thirsteh
Did you notice the contents of the text box change while the video is playing?
burgerbrain
I did not, my browser window was not large enough to view both at once. Even so, this strikes me as a very strange use of a flash video.
jalada
It automatically scrolls down once you start playing the video.
burgerbrain
Well, that much it does not do in my browser.
starwed
Nope. I suspect the site is fundamentally broken in my browser[1], given that I see two video elements, and the textbox is overlaid on top of several other elements, and there are some control elements floating seemingly randomly on the page.

Here's a screenshot of what I see: http://imgur.com/cET4F. Might be the nightly build's fault, of course!

1. FF nightly build, 11.0a1 (2011-11-28)

wingerlang
It is not very often you hear that song out in the wild. Nice.

For anyone interested it is called "fetts vette"

afc
I thought the opposite: ugh, it has some shitty (for my taste) music, lets just close it. :-/
harbud
Thanks. I think the music sounds cool and is quite apt for the page.
exDM69
I don't consider auto generated ASCII figures (from aalib or libcaca or similar) to be art. To me, art implies there is an artist behind the work of art or the technique used to generate it.

Real artists do their ASCII art 7 bits at a time.

morsch
In that case the developer of the converter (library) is the artist. I'm sure there's a lot of creative input involved in auto-converting a raster image into an ASCII figure.
atomicdog
Hmm, it would be interesting to try to use this to generate ascii heightmaps for games out of images.
jasonkester
Why the #eee on #fff color scheme? It took me a long time to realize that the white blur in the scroll area was changing, and that if I highlighted it it looked like an image.

Turn up the contrast so we can see it!

[dead] chrisjsmithuk
It doesn't work in IE9. That's just careless.