artiist

ASCII Art Generator, inspired by https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering

Usage

# Text output (default)
artiist input.png -o output.txt

# PNG output (renders via Typst with Tokyo Night color scheme)
artiist input.png -o output.png

# PDF output
artiist input.png -o output.pdf

# SVG output
artiist input.png -o output.svg

# Explicit format override
artiist input.png --format png -o my_art.dat

# Adjust contrast
artiist input.png --contrast 2.5 -o output.png

Output Formats

• text: Raw ASCII characters to stdout or file
• png: Rendered image with Inconsolata font on dark background (Tokyo Night Storm theme)
• pdf: Vector PDF document suitable for printing
• svg: Scalable vector graphic

Format is auto-detected from output file extension, or can be set explicitly with --format.

Installation

Requires Nix for the development environment (provides Rust toolchain and dependencies).

git clone https://github.com/arjdroid/artiist.git
cd artiist
nix develop  # or use direnv if configured

# Install to ~/.cargo/bin
cargo install --path crates/artiist-cli

# Uninstall
cargo uninstall artiist-cli

Development

nix develop
cargo run -p artiist-cli -- input.png -o output.png
cargo test --workspace

Todo

• Elm frontend with WASM bindings to run this in the browser not just CLI