An ASCII art converter is a software application that automatically converts an image into ASCII art, using vector quantization. Typically, this is done by sampling the image down to grayscale with less than 8-bit precision, so that each value corresponds to different ASCII character. Using HTML and CSS, many ASCII conversion programs can quantize to a full RGB colorspace, enabling colorized ASCII images.

Some source ports for the popular first person shooter Doom have an algorithm for rendering ASCII art out of the 3D imagery.

Gallery

<gallery> File:Redwingblackbird1.jpg|Original image File:Red-winged blackbird ASCII art.png|Greyscale ASCII version of image File:bird converted to ASCII characters.png|Converted image with a full RGB color space File:Anna ascii.gif|Automatic conversion using JavE </gallery>

See also

• List of text editors/ASCII art
• AAlib
• ASCII art
• PHP code to generate detailed ASCII art using the OCR technique
• PHP code to generate ASCII art from a jpg image
• Online tool to generate ASCII art from a image
• Online tool to convert QR Codes into ASCII art.