ASCII settings

This page covers the settings that shape the ASCII text overlay itself, found in the right panel.

Font size

Size of the monospace characters. Smaller characters mean a denser grid and more detail. The grid recalculates automatically when the font size changes.

Line height

Vertical spacing between rows. The default is 0.78 — tighter than normal text, so rows pack together for a denser picture.

Letter spacing

Horizontal spacing between characters. The default is 0.06em.

Color

Base color of the ASCII text. Works together with the blend mode below.

Opacity

Visibility of the ASCII layer over the background image. The default is 0.38, a subtle overlay. The background image also has its own opacity (default 0.86) over a dark tint.

Blend mode

How the ASCII text composites with the background image:

• Screen — additive blending; text lightens the image (default)
• Normal — opaque text drawn on top
• Multiply — darkening blend

Character ramp

The character set used to represent brightness. The default ramp is:

 .`,:;cbaO0%#@

Bright areas of the image map to the sparse characters at the start of the ramp (space, .), dark areas map to the dense characters at the end (#, @). Edit the ramp to change the texture of the whole image, or pick a preset from the dropdown:

• Classic — the default 14-step ramp
• Fine — a 70-step ramp for smooth gradation on detailed images
• Minimal — a coarse 10-step ramp
• Blocks — shade blocks (░▒▓█) for a chunky, pixel-art feel

Tone controls

These reshape how image brightness maps onto the ramp. All of them are deterministic — the same image and settings always produce the same text.

• Gamma — bends the tone curve. Below 1 lightens mids; above 1 darkens them.
• Brightness / Contrast — straightforward level adjustments. Useful when a wallpaper only spans a narrow tonal band and the conversion looks flat.
• Auto levels — stretches the image's tonal range so the darkest cell hits the end of the ramp and the lightest hits the start. The quickest fix for low-contrast images.
• Invert — flips light and dark before mapping.

Edge glyphs

Traces strong edges in the image with directional line characters — -, |, /, \ — chosen by the edge's orientation, while flat areas keep the brightness ramp. This gives the conversion crisp structure that reads well under fine positional effects. Edge threshold sets how strong a gradient must be to count as an edge; lower it to trace more lines.

Dither

Ordered (Bayer) dithering breaks smooth gradients into a fine deterministic texture instead of hard banding between ramp steps. 0 disables it; higher values dither more aggressively.

Detail

Supersampling factor. At 3× (the default) each cell averages a 3×3 block of samples instead of a single pixel, which removes aliasing noise and recovers detail from the source image. 1× reproduces the old single-sample behavior.