flâneur

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

alexharri.com · 7,341 words · saved by 5 readers

A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering January 17, 2026 Recently, I’ve been spending my time building an image-to-ASCII renderer. Below is the result — try dragging it around, the demo is interactive! One thing I spent a lot of effort on is getting edges looking sharp. Take a look at this rotating cube example: Try opening the “split” view. Notice how well the characters follow the contour of the square. This renderer works well for animated scenes, like the ones above, but we can also use it to render

saved by

related reading