catpicture

It cats pictures!

A command line tool for dumping a preview of an image on a remote machine to the command line. Useful for converting a picture to a thousand words, assuming word ∈ [ -~]*. Also handy for making fun ascii art from pictures.

Usage

cat imagename | catpicture [args]

OR

catpicture [args]

OR

curl -sv imageurl | catpicture [args]

Command Line Arguments

• -w Specify output width. (Default: 80).
• -h Output height. (Default: Determined from aspect ratio of input image.)
• -r [x y w h] - Select a sub-rectancle with the given dimensions.
• -c Try to display full color. (Only if your terminal supports full color.)
• -g Force greyscale. (Try using with -c to get full grey range if your terminal supports it.)
• -d [block (Default) |char [c]|art] Change drawing mode. Block (default) will fill with solid color blocks. Char will fill with the given character. Art will try to use ascii characters.

Release Plan

• v0.1.0 : First release -- Supports just '#' for output style. Allows -c for full-color mode, -r, -w, -h to change sizes.
• v0.2.0 : Automatically select correct aspect ratio when only -w or -h supplied. Support force-grey.
• v0.3.0 : Add new line algorithms with -d. Can fill BG instead of '#', supports BG, '#', and gradient.
• v0.4.0 : Use nearest neighbor to select the best looking ascii stand-in.
• (In Development) v0.5.0 : Hardening and improvements to robustness. Bounds checking. Ready for beta release.
• v0.6.0 : Allow threshold to be set for not drawing, so if people want black text to show as empty space (for writing to text file), that can be done.
• v0.7.0 : Introduce FFT to split high-frequency pixels from low frequency pixels. Draw high frequency in FG with font, low frequency in BG.
• v1.0.0 : Ready for release.