This is a CLI application taking an image and outputting a text file with the image drawn in ASCII style. This is based on the density level of the greyscale of the image once converted.
This was the result of following a tutorial in Python Playground Geeky Projects for the Curious Programmer by Mahesh Venkitachalam. If you can interested in the book it can be found here. As this was one of my first experiences with Python I thought this was a really cool idea and I hope to build on it further in the future.
As I had never setup a python environment before, these are the steps I carried out to do it.
Install pip/upgrade to the latest version - python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade pip
Next install virtualenv - python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv This allows you to manage packages for different projects.
Once this is done run python3 -m virtualenv env for your isolated python environment and source env/bin/activate to activate it.
Packages can now be installed
pip install numpy
pip install image
The image package is a dependancy of PIL (Python Imaging Library) and numpy is used to compute averages.
To run the CLI help command run python ascii.py -h otherwise to run the program with it's required params run python ascii.py --file image.jpg