Editing ASCII art (section)

===Image to text conversion===
Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to text characters, which is a special case of [[vector quantization]]. A method is to sample the image down to [[grayscale]] with less than [[integer (computer science)|8-bit]] precision, and then assign a character for each value. Such ASCII art generators often allow users to choose the intensity and contrast of the generated image.<ref>{{cite web|url= http://asciiartgenerator.net/ascii-art-generator-an-overview/| archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20130801070421/http://asciiartgenerator.net/ascii-art-generator-an-overview/| archive-date= 1 August 2013|title=ASCII Art Generator: An Overview| date= 12 January 2012| publisher= asciiartgenerator.net| access-date= 19 March 2012}}</ref>

Three factors limit the ''fidelity'' of the conversion, especially of photographs:

* depth (solutions: reduced line spacing; bold style; block elements; colored background; good [[#Types and styles|shading]]);
* sharpness (solutions: a longer text, with a smaller font; a greater set of characters; [[#Non fixed-width ASCII|variable width]] fonts);
* ratio (solutions with compatibility issues: font with a square grid; stylized without extra [[leading|line spacing]]).

Examples of converted images are given below.

This is one of the earliest forms of ASCII art, dating back to the early days of the 1960s [[minicomputer]]s and [[Teleprinter|teletype]]s. During the 1970s, it was popular in US [[shopping mall|malls]] to get a [[t-shirt]] with a photograph printed in ASCII art on it from an automated kiosk containing a computer, and London's [[Science Museum, London|Science Museum]] had a similar service to produce printed portraits. With the advent of the web, [[HTML]] and [[Cascading Style Sheets|CSS]], many ASCII conversion programs will now quantize to a full [[RGB color model|RGB]] colorspace, enabling colorized ASCII images.

{| style="margin:1em auto;"
|-
|| [[File:Redwingblackbird1.jpg|200px]] || [[File:Red-winged blackbird ASCII art.png|200px]] || [[File:bird converted to ASCII characters.png|200px]]
|}

Still images or movies can also be converted to ASCII on various [[UNIX]] and [[UNIX-like]] systems using the [[AAlib]] (black and white) or [[libcaca]] (colour) graphics device driver, or the [[VLC media player]] or [[mpv (media player)|mpv]] under [[Windows]], Linux or [[macOS]]; all of which render the screen using ASCII symbols instead of pixels.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/linux-multimedia-hacks/0596100760/ch03s09.html|title=54. Watch Videos in ASCII Art - Linux Multimedia Hacks [Book]|website=www.oreilly.com}}</ref>

There are also a number of [[smartphone]] applications, such as ASCII cam for [[Android (operating system)|Android]], that generate ASCII art in real-time using input from the phone's camera. These applications typically allow the ASCII art to be saved as either a text file or as an image made up of ASCII text.