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ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

alexharri.com

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Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#71

Post by mads_quist »

qingcharles wrote: post #60
stephantul wrote: post #53

Amazing post, I didn’t think this through a lot, but since you are normalizing the vectors and calculating the euclidean distance, you will get the same results using a simple matmul, because euclidean distance over normalized vectors is a linear transform of the cosine distance. Since you are just interested in the ranking, not the actual distance, you could also consider skipping the sqrt. This gives the same ranki…

It's stuff like this I would have loved to know when I was doing game engine dev in the 90s.

I want to do game programming again like it's 1999. No more `npm i` or "accept all cookies" :/ rant off :)

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#73

Post by akie »

crazygringo wrote: post #40

> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Not to take away from this truly amazing write-up (wow), but there's at least one generator that uses shape: https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ See particularly the image right above where it says "Note how the algorithm selects the…

Love the monochrome gallery of examples https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/monochrome-galler...

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#74

Post by LexiMax »

Only tangentially related, but the title reminds me of hack you could do on old DOS machines to get access to a 160x100 16-color display mode on a CGA graphics adapter.

The display mode is actually a hacked up 80x25 text mode. So in that specific narrow case, you have a display mode where text characters very much function as pixels.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

- https://github.com/drwonky/cgax16demo

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#76

Post by aleyan »

Great work! While I was building ascii-side-of-the-moon [0][1] I briefly considered writing my own ascii renderer to capture differences in shade and shape of the Lunar Maria[2] better. Ended up just using chafa [3] with the hope of coming back to ascii rendering after everything is working end to end.

Are you planning to release this as a library or a tool, or should we just take the relevant MIT licensed code from your website [4]?

[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46421045

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_mare

[3] https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa

[4] https://github.com/alexharri/website/tree/master/src

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#77

Post by soulofmischief »

jrmg wrote: post #28

This is amazing all round - in concept, writing, and coding (both the idea and the blog post about it). I feel confident stating that - unless fed something comprehensive like this post as input, and perhaps not even then - an LLM could not do something novel and complex like this, and will not be able to for some time, if ever. I’d love to read about someone proving me wrong on that.

I'm confident that they can. This isn't a new idea. Something like this would be a walk in the park for Opus 4.5 in the right harness.

Of course it likely still needs a skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand to keep it on track or keep things performant, but it's an iterative process. I've already built my own ASCII rendering engines in the past, and have recently built one with a coding model, and there was no friction.

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#78

Post by roskelld »

I do enjoy these kinds of write ups, especially when it's about something that might seem so simple on the surface, but in order to get looking great you really have to go in deep.

Lucas Pope did a really nice write up on how he developed his dithering system for Return of The Obra Dinn. Recommended if you also enjoyed this blog post.

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#79

Post by jurf »

This at the same time super cool and really disappointing, as I've been carrying around this idea in my head for maybe ten years as a cool side project and never got around to implementing it.

However, there might still be room for competition, heh. I always wanted to do this on the _entirety_ of Unicode to try getting the most possible resolution out of the image.

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