ASCII art

ASCII maps the brightness of each cell to a character ramp, from sparse to dense: standard .:-=+#%@, a detailed 70-character ramp, block shades ░▒▓█, and others. Terminal characters are about twice as tall as they are wide, so rows are sampled at the *character aspect (0.5 by default) to keep circles round.

Braille uses Unicode Braille patterns (U+2800–U+28FF). Each character holds a 2×4 grid of dots, which gives eight times the resolution of ASCII. Pixels are reduced to one bit with Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion (or a plain threshold).

Brightness and contrast adjust before conversion, and Invert swaps the ramp. Preview for a dark terminal inverts the default mapping, because on a dark background dense characters read as light.

Colour modes wrap each character in an HTML colour span, and produce ANSI escape codes: 24-bit truecolour (ESC[38;2;r;g;bm) or the nearest xterm-256 colour (ESC[38;5;nm, from the 6×6×6 cube or the grey ramp) for older terminals. Download .ans and cat it in a terminal.

Wrap as comment prefixes each line for C, shell, SQL, HTML, batch, or assembly.