Color Ascii Art Library

thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :) Well VLC media player's senior developer sam was bored some time ago and created libcaca. The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.' But you just can't help looking at that beautiful picture of Stitch, and Doom in coloured ascii is da bomb. It works on dos/windows, Linux and Mac OS X and there is a VLC plugin and SDL backend available."

brilliant!

[mr.mack]

and I thought aalib was good http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/

What about....

[Anonymous Coward]

libkacke?

Re:What about....

[Hakubi_Washu]

Ah, and a streamlined, faster version would be libflitzekacke? :-)

Caca

[Ratbert42]

Heh heh. He said "caca" [realdictionary.com].

Re:Caca

[jandrese]

I think he knows what it means. Check out the homepage, particularly the graphic on the top right.

Re:Caca

[Spacejock]

I think he realises what he's done: "libcaca - Colour AsCii Art library - it's da shit!" Simon

Re:Caca

[srobring]

The caption under the title line of the page says:

it's da shit!

Amazing

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

So bad the name doesn't seems to say much about nice colours .... : )

Re:Amazing

[Pippity]

You haven't ever had to change a diaper now have you? Well you're right, I s'pose... I wouldn't exactly use the word "nice" to describe the variety of colors involved.

libCACA?

[Yvan256]

Wow, now that is funny. In french, caca means poo or shit. That guy just created "libshit".

Re:libCACA?

[Yvan256]

Oh crap (pun intended), two comments above me for the same thing. Score: -1, Redundant, here I come!

Re:libCACA?

[rot26]

>Oh crap (pun intended), two comments above me for the same thing. Score: -1, >Redundant, here I come! I doubt it. This is Slashdot - home of redundant, duplicate information (or at least, data).

nop, libshit allready exist.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

libshit is the code name for kernel32.dll : )

Re:libCACA?

[anno1602]

He's only following AAlib. In German small children speak, both A-A and Kacka (or caca, if you will) mean poo or shit.

He knows this already

[wthynot]

The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.'

Sounds like he has a pretty humble attitude about this whole thing.

Look at his webpage logo, people!

[Gudlyf]

His webpage logo [via.ecp.fr] is clealy a lop of poo.

Re:Look at his webpage logo, people!

[Megane]

Not just any lop of poo. It's a Toriyama [toriyamaworld.com] lop of poo.

Re:libCACA?

[BigJim.fr]

> Wow, now that is funny. In french, caca means poo
> or shit. That guy just created "libshit".

Actually Sam is French, so the humor is completely voluntary.

In spanish too

[Nicolay77]

It seems from the posts that it's also shit in a lot of european languages.

Re:libCACA?

[jcuervo]

ObSnopesLink: [snopes.com]

Claim: The Chevrolet Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translates as "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Status: False.

I've been waiting for this for ages

[Space cowboy]

.. so I too can view movies in colour when I'm browsing with Lynx :)

Simon

Re:I've been waiting for this for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

And if the conversion to ASCII is done at the server, I can watch streaming movies on my 56k modem!

Re:I've been waiting for this for ages

[Illserve]

Not unless it's heavily motion compressed.

40 x 80 characters x 30 frames per second is 96,000 bytes per second.

And that's not including color information either, which is 4 bits per character, adding another 48K Bytes/sec.

watching pr0n with aalib + xine

[quigonn]

I really have to recommend it! It's great fun to watch! I always use it when I want to watch pr0n but too lazy to fire up X11.

Re:watching pr0n with aalib + xine

[zhenlin]

When you do get to fire up Mozilla, you get to watch using libpr0n instead.

Oh no...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see it now. Tons of goatse ASCII's coming up :-/

TheDraw

[Stavr0]

Boy that takes me back ... [google.ca]

Re:TheDraw

[jonom]

Wow, that brings back some memories... Built a lot of BBS screens with that proggy.

ASCII art for Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa! In a moment of genious, I figured out a nice ASCII art logo for slashdot. Here it is (drumroll):

/.

Brilliant, eh?

Re:ASCII art for Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine's better:

......jXP....
.....dR?.....
....jDF...... News for nerds
...iH7.......
..dKP........ stuff that matters
.jM?....,db..
dHP.....'^P'.

I originally drew it without the dots and with a startrek ship in the background, but that was impossible to paste here.

Re:ASCII art for Slashdot

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

It's not in colour though!

Re:ASCII art for Slashdot

[Waffle Iron]

It's not in colour though!

This one might be:

/. [slashdot.org]

Re:ASCII art for Slashdot

[Megane]

/. [slashdot.org]

Is it in coulor now?

Re:ASCII art for Slashdot

[AmbientOrbDevice]

I love when people spell 'genius' wrong :) Not quite as fun as spelling 'illiterate' wrong, but good anyway.

Re:ASCII art for Slashdot

[momerath2003]

And to go with that ASCII art logo, how about a nice ASCII goatse picture?

What, it's been done?

Oh.

But I bet it hasn't been done in color... maybe that will give the trolls something to aspire to. And I don't mean pipe the picture through libcaca!

The server...

[KDan]

Looks like the hosting server definitely is gone caca... slashdotted already :-(

Daniel

Google cache link

[thedj_sd]

http://www.google.nl/search?q=cache:NtGVCbhHFTkJ:s am.zoy.org/projects/libcaca/+libcaca&hl=nl&ie=UTF- 8

Re:Google cache link

[l0wland]

I love to click [google.nl] on a link :-)

Mirror, front page text

[rusty_razor]

Note the mirror [via.ecp.fr].
libcaca - Colour AsCii Art library
it's da shit!
Hello /. folks! Please be easy on the server!
Images and tarball are mirrored at http://www.via.ecp.fr/~sam/local/libcaca/.
The libcaca library is a graphics library that outputs text instead of pixels, so that it can work on older video cards or text terminals. It is not unlike the famous AAlib library. libcaca needs a terminal to work, thus it should work on all Unix systems (including Mac OS X) using either the slang library or the ncur

Re:Mirror, front page text

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this, for the link challanged? For those who cant click and look at the page themselves? Or for pure karma whore-ism?

ANSI Art Library

[lordscarlet]

It'll probably get slashdotted quickly, but for those who remember ANSI Art groups like iCE and ACiD I am in the process of creating a library of their packs viewable online. http://ansi.idledreams.net [idledreams.net] for the actual site and http://idledreams.net/ansi/ [idledreams.net] for news about it.

Re:ANSI Art Library

[lordscarlet]

OK. It died even quicker than I expected. The site loads fine,b ut if you get broken images all over it's because the server has run out of RAM (it sucks). Check back later and it should be fine. I swear the site works :)

Re:ANSI Art Library

[lcracker]

That's what you get for using .NET, what are you thinking?!

Re:ANSI Art Library

[WiKKeSH]

While you're at it, you can check individual group's sites.

http://www.senseimagery.com
http://www.acid.org
http://www.ice.org
http://www.spreadthedisease. com
http://www.spreadthedisease.com/27inch

Re:ANSI Art Library

[lordscarlet]

And don't forget ASCII sites

http://www.mimic.ca

OK. I'm lame and only know one ASCII group site. :)

Sweet!

[siskbc]

It'll probably get slashdotted quickly, but for those who remember ANSI Art groups like iCE and ACiD I am in the process of creating a library of their packs viewable online. http://ansi.idledreams.net for the actual site and http://idledreams.net/ansi/ for news about it.

That's taking me back about 10 years. Oh shit, I'm 16 and I can't get a fucking date! AAaaaah!

Glad I'm really 26 and married. Oh, wait - AAaaahhh!!!

Seriously, thanks for posting the stuff.

Re:ANSI Art Library

[poot_rootbeer]

What about CLaP!?

They were MY favorite ANSi GRooP.

Slashdotted

[yourruinreverse]

Man, that was fast. One second I was loading and reading the libcaca page, I immediately browsed down to the links to the images, and after some 30 seconds after I loaded the page, already the PNG's (or indeed the entire server) was unavailable. There is a mirror for the images, though:

http://www.via.ecp.fr/~sam/local/libcaca/

For the lazy people

[l0wland]

Click [via.ecp.fr] on it !

Wrong assumptions

[DollyTheSheep]

I'm a true slashdot reader, but I don't like ASCII "art". Who came up with this nonsense, anyway?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Wrong assumptions

[n4vu]

"Wrong assumptions" may be right. I believe it was teletype operators who came up with character art long before computers were on the scene.

Re:Wrong assumptions

[MxTxL]

Back in the stone age, you know, before 1990, when modem speed was measured in baud and 300 of them was pretty good, people used to connect to BBSes as their primitive form of an internet. These were sort of stand-alone websites that you had to dial into directly (yes, over real phone lines). Since 300 baud modems transmit data at dismally slow speeds (and besides computer graphics displays were still primitive) it was necessary to provide any graphics content in a format that was easily and quickly transmitted and supported by the hardware. And by hardware, we're talking about Commodores and Amigas and early IBM PCs.

Today, it's primitive and low-res but Back In The Day(tm), this type of art was the shiz-nit. Art packs (ok, these were mostly ANSI, not ASCII but similar vein) were traded across the country from BBS to BBS.

If you've never tried to draw anything with giant multicolored blocks, you can't understand the talent that goes into this art medium. The ACiD guys were REALLY good.

Re:Wrong assumptions

[MxTxL]

I did mean the C64 (64 whole K of memory, wow)... No, not all systems were incapable of good graphics, but there were many that were. To cater to the lowest common denominator, and in the interests of transmission speed (which was real money, when talking about phone bills) ANSI and ASCII art were the way to go, especially on BBS splash screens.

Funny, but...

[gxv]

So we have now Big Mouth Billy Bass linux support [slashdot.org]. We have color Ascii Art Library. Wow. I really needed those two.
But when we're talking about it more seriously: I've heard once from CTO of some medium-business company, when I was suggesting him to use some Open Source solution instead of MS SQL based system: Yes. I know that they do lots of useful things, but how can I trust to people who release stuff like aalib.
So the bottom line is they will never consider us geeks as serious conversation part

Re:Funny, but...

[bustersnyvel]

A company not trusting Open Source because of this would be the same as a company not trusting any Windows programs just because some 12 year old kid wrote a crappy VB program. There are plenty of kids who do this, and yet people use windoze. Something must be flawed in your reasoning...

Re:Funny, but...

[acidrain69]

That's like saying "don't release any programs for windows because they make viruses and crappy solitare games". Windows has plenty USEFUL applications, as does Linux.

Re:Funny, but...

[NotoriousQ]

But do they trust the people who put a flight simulator in Excel?

Re:Funny, but...

[bhtooefr]

Isn't that something involving X97:L97? BTW, Excel 2000 has a racing game.

Were we go again...

[RatBastard]

Every time there is a story about someone doing something just for the hell of it some tool comes along and says that it's a bad idea because it doesn't directly enrich Linux/Open Source/The Roman Empire/Whatever in the manner that said poster wants it to.

Dude, and all of your close-minded brethren, chill the hell out. People do these things because they are having fun. They do them because they WANT to.

Not everyoine gives a damn about Fighting The Big Fight. Get over yourself.

Re:Funny, but...

[Piquan]

Yes. I know that they do lots of useful things, but how can I trust to people who release stuff like aalib.

How can you trust people who don't?

I'm serious here. Every programmer is going to need to learn different things at different times. (Everybody who thinks that programmers can learn all they need to know in college, you have the wrong idea.) They need to hone their craft. They need to practice.

Would you like programmers to have their learning, honing, practicing programs be the big, important o

libcaca?

[JBv]

In Portuguese (ranking #7 of the most spoken language), caca is a synonym for feces. Not a very fortunate name for a library I would say.

Re:libcaca?

[nat5an]

Yeah, it's pretty much a synonym for poo in most languages. At least, I think it is.

Re:libcaca?

[Cygnus78]

Well not in swedish. But if you change the c's to k's (which sounds the same) it means cookie.

Re:libcaca?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, did none of you ever watch Quantum Leap? You call yourselves geeks and yet the first thing that didn't come into your mind was the phrase "Ziggy says it's all gone a little caca."? Bah. Bah to you all!

Re:libcaca?

[JDWTopGuy]

Same for spanish. Essentially "crap". But there's probably already a libcrap out there (maybe it translates C code into rap lyrics?).

And of course the front page says "its da shit", so it was definitely implied.

More ASCII Art

[MouseR]

For those interested, here's Text mode Quake [slashdot.org] and AsciiMac [mit.edu], wich seem to predate the previous one, including the X11 ASCII [slashdot.org] art thing.

What is it with ASCII??

Way of the future

[doktorstop]

Amazing stuff... now what? let me guess... 1) a KDE emulator for the console, with COLORS! 2) most games ported ... imagine WarCraftIII in pure ASCII... well, the refresh rate got to be good, though =) And all those posts that say it's a waste of time... just think broad!

Re:Way of the future

[NotoriousQ]

> well, the refresh rate got to be good, though

Actually the refresh rate will decrease. The problem is that the console is a serial device. You have to position the cursor and then draw the character. That is much slower than what the video cards do with GL or even video. Worse...now you have to do all processing on the CPU as well. So expect frames to go down.

Well, until GPU's will start having ascii art on the GPU.

C64 PETSCII

[NevesisEF]

I can't view this now - big brother's proxy and all - but it sounds like the good old days of the C64 BBSs that used PETSCII graphics. Full color, and many graphical characters - however ALL CAPS TEXT ONLY! But the days of the good old animated prompts and colorful message boards are still in my memories, yet I have no desire to go back to them and wait for a cursor to jump all around the screen at 1200 baud!

Of course you could always just use quicktime

[b-baggins]

Apple provides an ASCII quicktime movie player, here:

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Cod e/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.htm

There's nothing quite like watching the Matrix trailer in ASCII glory.

Re:Of course you could always just use quicktime

[ichandarin]

Oops. You got the address wrong!

Here are the correct links:
-The program itself + source are at:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Code/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample/qtplyr.c. htm [apple.com]

-And the sample video:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Code/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.htm [apple.com]

Hope those links help.

ASCII-art Made Easy

[dupper]

@

Behold! The human form in all it glory!

You can even recreate classic works of art:

The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan Van Eyck:

______
|..(......_
|@@....
|..d........

The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo:

......
..@ @
......
Tyr Hits! -more-

And for God's sake, lighten up the lameness filter!

Re:ASCII-art Made Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan Van Eyck:

______
|..(......_
|@@....
|..d........

That @ on the right looks pregnant to me...

Re:ASCII-art Made Easy

[BinLadenMyHero]

Have you ever heard of the <TT> tag?

For all those agitated by the name...

[SharpFang]

Yes, it means what you think it means.
Just see the logo [via.ecp.fr]

Hardware Optimization!

[MarkJensen]

Sounds like the perfect time to try out my new video card [bbspot.com]!

Sweeeeet! ;)

Unicode

[Espen]

Bah! If it doesn't support unicode, what's the point?

Re:Unicode

[lordscarlet]

If it supported Unicode it wouldn't be ASCII.

Excellent!

[adrianbaugh]

Now maybe we can finally replace X with a modern graphical user interface!

libcaca ?

[o'reor]

I wonder in fear what kind of application the poopsmith [homestarrunner.com] might build with that library...

This is actually useful

[Mr. Moose]

Whenever someone mirrors some webpage in a /. posting, because the crowd has downed the server, he can use this lib to mirror the images too.

i hope this means people want more

[RouterSlayer]

I really hope this means people getting into more "ascii" art type things, like games.

It would really great if somebody out there could help out with the Trek7 project over at sourceforge!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/trek7/

I'd also like to get my "Bambi vs Godzilla" ascii art movie online... Yes, movies! :)

But really, trek7 is the one I need the most help with. Aren't there any Trek7 fans out there?

ATI drives can do that

[Tobias Luetke]

Indeed if you have the latest drivers for the DirectX series of ATI cards installed ( Catalyst 3.8+ ) you will find a smartshader menu in the display properties. Smartshaders are applyed in the last pass on the picture before its send to the screen. There are filters for making it look like a classic painting and things like that. In the settings for OpenGL smartshader there is a option to render the picture as ASCII ( only white /black or green/black though ). However it way funny to play Call of duty in ascii .

Been there, done that, two or three years ago.

[WolfWings]

Should I bother releasing my patch to AALib? Replaces the monochrome buffer with a 32bpp RGB- buffer, uses a much more tuned colour-selection system than libCACA appears to.

A screenshot of the BattleToads title screen [archive.org], linked out of Archive.org as I don't have a current website for the TextNES emulator worth pointing too at the moment, unfortunately.

But yeah... been there, did that, didn't think anyone would be interested so I never released the patch.

I say you should

[headbulb]

Go ahead release it. I always wanted color in aalib..

Re:Been there, done that, two or three years ago.

[boa13]

Please release it. I don't want that libcaca shitty name to stick around. ;-)

HOW IS THIS ASCII ART? Check Simpsons ASCII archiv

[BurningTyger]

It merely converts the picture to lower resolution image by replacing each pixel with a symbol like * or @ with different colour. This is cheating. Anyone can write a program that does this conversion.

The real ascii art uses only black text. And by using different ascii symbol, it can create the black and white and different shade of gray to protray an image.

For instance, Simpsons ASCII ART [lardlad.com]

it's not useless

[jago25_98]

I can now play Unreal Tournament/whatever on my silent p90 thin-client

Re:it's not useless

[JDWTopGuy]

Your p90 is a thin-client? Mine's a server. Much more useful. More 1337.

Re:libcaca

[kinnell]

I do not seriously think this'll help this lib's author deploying his product.

Agreed. Most commercial software firms will not develop with a library if it's name means shit. It's attitudes like this which work against ascii art libraries being taken seriously in the commercial world.

Re:libcaca

[GNUman]

You, sir, would have my mod points if you weren't already at 5+ Funny.

Thank you for brightening my day.

Re:libcaca

[jabberw0k]

What about Publishit Pro? http://www.huamed.com/publish/ [huamed.com]

Re:libcaca

[jest3r]

people dont have a problem using and abusing the Gimp .. playing with libcaca doesn't seem so bad.

actually how about piping the Gimp through libcaca .. i hear stuff like that is poular in Japan ..

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Pornography? No thanks!

[mangu]

...exploited in this industry where surface is everything...

Only in softcore, my friend, hardcore pr0n also has penetrations to amazing depths...

Re:Pornography? No thanks!

[foolip]

Well you're not watching what I'm watching... I've seen all sorts of stuff where women are the central objects of domination, including of course lesbian action...

Correct, not all porn is of the same character. As for lesbian porn, the basic idea is that men should fantisise about having two women at the same time, and we all know that what a pair of lesbians really wants to do is pleasure a man, right? Besides, when did you ever see two men getting it on in the middle of a "normal" porno movie? No, femal

Re:Pornography? No thanks!

[tgibbs]

Your capitalist point of view is too simplistic. The economical sustainability of an industry is completely irrelevant to its ethical implications or whether or not someone is exploited. Just take a look at the meat industry, or any of the industries which uses underpayed workers in the third world (bordering to slavery sometimes) to see that economics and ethics have nothing to do with each other.

However, true slave labor aside, even when such employment is "exploitive" (in the sense that most of the pro

Re:Pornography? No thanks!

[foolip]

No, I don't see it as any better when women dominate males than the other way around. The problem lies in that the norm is the male being the dominator. Porno isn't a bad thing per definition, but I think in its current state it's only helping to enfore the patriarchy and keeping men and women separated. If people want to do the things that happens in porno (anal, facials, whatever) at home that's no problem, but it's not good that majority of porno is all the same and gives a severly distorted view on sexu

Re:I have my erect penis in my hand.

[spiny]

Careful now.

Down with this sort of thing!