ASCII Republican Primaries

The command we're exploring today is called asciiview. It's a fun little diversion that takes regular images, (i.e. jpg, png, etc.) and displays an ASCII version of the image. For fun, I've converted the images of a handful of the republican presidential hopefuls. Click on each image to see them in all their 8-bit glory. See if you can recognize each of them.





Enter the poll (on the right of the screen) and pick your favorite 2-bit ... er.. 8-bit Republican president. Does one seem to present too many question marks? Does it appear to be gibberish coming out of another's mouth? You decide. If we left out your favorite, let me know and I may do a follow-up post including others. Next week we'll hold the democratic ASCII primary.


asciiview itself has a number of undocumented controls once you run it. You can find out most of them by pressing 'h' to see a help screen. Some of the more useful commands include adjusting the gamma (; and '), contrast (, and .) and brightness (<>). 'u' allows you to change settings like the character set and boldness. 'g' allows you to change the font (the help screen says 'f' does this, so maybe I just have a buggy version that uses 'g' instead). There seems to be a few other commands that I don't understand and can't find any documentation for. '[' and ']' change the characters used in a strange way. SHIFT-Q seems to animate a static fuzzy screen into focus of the original image. If anyone knows where to find the complete documentation. Let me know.