I’ve updated artscii – now faster, with fewer bugs and more features. Get the new version here.

New features:

• Much faster.
• Color!
• You can select multiple font sizes, up to 500 pt – which is crazy (note that larger fonts take longer to analyze)
• Artscii can convert images to black + white on the fly.
• Option to invert – white fonts on a black background instead of black on white (see starry night below)
• Dithering!  It only *kind of* works at this point, but it’s in there.
• Tool Tips – hold mouse over confusing features for a (still probably confusing) explanation of what they do.
• A Replay Button – Mildly pointless but fun to watch, it plays back the placing of letters at high speed.
• Run artscii from the command-line.  This feature is very limited and possibly even a little buggy, but just run artscii with the path of an image and it will process it with some default settings, save the result as [filename].artscii.png, and exit automatically. I used this with some scripting to create the video below

Some new eye-candy:

Some features still to come (maybe).

• words and phrases
• overlapping letters
• More control – advanced options for selecting which letters in which fonts in which sizes.
• option for letters to go outside the frame (hard to explain… you’ll see what I mean)
• Better dithering