ASCII ART

Posted by Michelle Hirsch, May 10, 2005

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Ahhh, the memories of my youth. Playing wiffle ball in my front yard with my friends. Riding bikes around the neighborhood. Programming in LEGO and BASIC on my Apple 2, and always wanting (but never getting) an ASCII art self-portrait on a T-shirt. Avid readers of POTW have surely picked up on my nostalgic bent by now (Magic 8-Ball, anyone?) so I'm sure you won't be surprised with this week's picks. There are two (yes, TWO) functions on the File Exchange that create ASCII art. For those not in the know, ASCII art replaces pixels in an image with ASCII characters. If you squint your eyes just right, you can make out the original image in the ASCII text file. Many of us remember when that was about the only way to express yourself visually on a computer. In fact, MATLAB 1's plotting routines generated quite similar results. On to the entries: Nasar Ahmad's ASCII Image and Frederico Forte's ASCII text image generator both do a great job of creating ASCII art in MATLAB. In a very unscientic test, I found some pictures looked better with one tool and some with the other, so give them both a shot. Thanks for the great submissions, guys.