"gifscii" is a
cool little
C program that will
render a
gif file in
ASCII characters. It provides
some control of image
scaling,
contrast, and
brightness, and allows the image to be
inverted (so
that light areas are displayed as dark areas, and vice
versa). However, best results are obtained with a combination of image manipulations such as scaling
and
cropping and contrast adjustments performed directly
on the
gif with a program such as
The Gimp, and
manipulating the ASCII rendering with the rudimentary
controls of
gifscii.
The program appears to have been written by Paul Kline and John Ferrell and contains this copyright notice in
the single "C" file that makes up the gifscii distribution as I found it:
/* Copyright Feb, 1994 Paul Kline. pk6811s@acad.drake.edu */
/* All rights to these tables and gif-ascii conversion routines reserved. */
/* These tables and routines may be copied and distributed except that no */
/* computer program may be developed from them for commercial or for-profit */
/* purposes without the express written permission of the copyright holder */
/* This notice is not to be understood as granting such permission. */
/* All output of the program is the property of the owner of the input */
Compiling gifscii requires linking in the math library...
cc -o gifscii gifscii.c -lm
I add this because the program, as I found it, contained nothing in the way of instructions.
An example of gifscii output can be seen on my home node.