LetterImages

I’ve made LetterImages! It’s a little website that renders images as ASCII. Not a hugely imaginative name, I know.

It functions both as an arty piece for pre-existing images gratefully taken from Unsplash, and as a means for one to upload individual photos.

Canvas does most of the heavy lifting here, plotting the image and analysing the pixel data from each chunk of image. The visible output itself is a multitude of spans.

It’s a bit rough n' ready in places, but that’s fine - it’s a side project! One of the main incentives was to create something with an immediate result. Work has been very stressful these past two months and I haven’t been coding for fun as much as I’d like. It has felt wonderful to build something a little lighter over the weekend.

The code is available for perusal on GitHub, and I’ve commented in the main .js file to explain how it’s all working.

Oh, and it’s pretty CPU intensive, sorry! OffscreenCanvas and Workers look like the perfect candidates for this, but a lack of Safari support snuffed that out for now.