Picharsso

A utility for converting images to text art.

Installation    |    Documentation    |    Examples    |    Contributing

Installation

Run the following command:

pip install picharsso

This will:

• download and install the picharsso Python package (along with its dependencies).
• create an executable, picharsso, for the CLI (command line interface).

Verification

To verify that Picharsso is installed, run:

python -c "import picharsso"

Commands

Picharsso ships with a CLI that provides some basic functionality from the terminal.

Usage

Run the following command to display a helpful message:

picharsso -h

Usage: picharsso [options] <command> [args]

  A utility for converting images to text art.

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  draw  Generate text art from an image.
  info  Displays package information.

Consider the following image:

Apple Computer [Rob Janoff, 1977]

To convert an image to text art, run:

picharsso draw -c -H 32 <path/to/image> gradient

Here's what it should look like:

Breakdown

Argument	Effect
-c	Apply image colors to the output text.
-H 32	Sets the number of lines of the output text to 32.
gradient	Use the gradient style.

Don't forget to replace <path/to/image>.

Refer to the CLI documentation to learn about the various commands and arguments.

Library

The example from the previous section can be implemented in just a few lines of Python:

from PIL import Image
from picharsso import new_drawer

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Open image
    image = Image.open("<path/to/image>")

    # Define drawer
    drawer = new_drawer("braille", height=32, colorize=True)

    # Print drawer output
    print(drawer(image))

Here's what it should look like:

Styles

Refer to the Styles documentation for an in-depth guide to the image processing behind Picharsso.

Now consider this animated GIF:

Nyan Cat

With some more lines of code, you can animate GIFs in text!

import time

from PIL import Image
from picharsso import new_drawer
from picharsso.utils import clear_screen, terminal_size


if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Open image
    image = Image.open("<path/to/image>")

    # Get terminal height
    height, _ = terminal_size()

    # Define drawer
    drawer = new_drawer("braille", height=height, colorize=True, threshold=0)

    # Iterate over frames
    texts = []
    for frame_id in range(image.n_frames):
        # Select frame
        image.seek(frame_id)

        # Save output for frame
        texts.append(drawer(image))

    # Iterate over saved outputs in a circular manner
    num_frames = len(texts)
    counter = 0
    while True:
        # Refresh
        clear_screen()

        # Print output
        print(texts[counter])

        # Set a delay between frames
        time.sleep(1 / num_frames)

        # Circular increment
        counter = (counter + 1) % num_frames

Here's what it should look like:

Refer to the API documentation to learn about the various classes and functions.

Examples

Check out some more examples.

You can use an image directly from the web too!

Contributing

Do you have a feature request, bug report, or patch? Great! Check out the contributing guidelines!

License

Copyright (c) 2019 Kelvin DeCosta. Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.