MooTools ASCII Art

By David Walsh on January 3, 2011

I didn't realize that I truly was a nerd until I could admit to myself that ASCII art was better than the pieces Picasso, Monet, or Van Gogh could create. ASCII art is unmatched in its beauty, simplicity, and ... OK, well, I'm being ridiculous; ASCII art is good for a few giggles but that seems to be it. A new MooTools class has hit the Forge: MooAsciiArt. Let's have some fun by turning images and DOM nodes into glorious, character-driven ASCII art.

View Demo

Sample HTML

To illustrate how awesome this MooTools resource is, let's set up both an H2 tag and IMG tag to convert to beautiful ASCII art:

<h2>David Walsh Blog</h2>
<img src="/wp-content/themes/2k11/images/homeLogo.png" id="logoImage" alt="David Walsh Blog" />

These basic elements will be converted to glorious ASCII art! The anticipation should be viagra to your geeky mind!

The MooTools JavaScript

There are two ways to use MooAsciiArt: images or basic DOM nodes. Using MooAsciiArt on images is simple; simply use the toAsciiArt method to convert your image to ASCII art:

document.id("logoImage").toAsciiArt(true);

You may also use MooAsciiArt's convertTags method to convert DOM nodes to ASCII art:

MooAsciiArt.fontPath = "MooAsciiArt/Demo/fonts/"
MooAsciiArt.convertTags({ h2:"Doom" });

The string that accompanies the tag name is the "flf" font file which represents the character representation for every letter. The following is a snippet of the "Doom.flf" file:

       @@
 ______@
|___  /@
  $/ / @
  / /  @
./ /___@
\_____/@
       @
       @@
 ___ @
|  _|@
| |  @
| |  @
| |  @
| |_ @
|___|@
     @@
__     @
\ \    @
 \ \   @
  \ \  @
   \ \ @
    \_\@
       @
       @@
 ___ @
|_  |@
  | |@
  | |@
  | |@
 _| |@
|___|@
     @@
 /\ @
|/\|@
  $ @
  $ @
  $ @
  $ @
    @
    @@
        @
        @
        @
        @
        @
    $   @
 ______ @
|______|@@
 _ @
( )@
 \|@
 $ @
 $ @
 $ @
   @
   @@
       @
       @
  __ _ @
 / _` |@
| (_| |@
 \__,_|@
       @
       @@
 _     @
| |    @
| |__  @
| '_ \ @
| |_) |@
|_.__/ @
       @
       @@

The FLF file allows you to create your own font formats, so creating your own fonts can be super easy.

View Demo

You could be the next great artist. The next ~~Picasa~~ Webcasso. In all seriousness, ASCII art is pretty fucking cool. It's our way to rebel against the hippie artists that don't understand that our code is art. If you like ASCII art like I do, you'll love this awesome MooTools class.

Recent Features

By David WalshJanuary 20, 2014

5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...

By David WalshDecember 23, 2011

CSS Filters

CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

Incredible Demos

By David WalshJune 29, 2009

Highlighter: A MooTools Search & Highlight Plugin

Searching within the page is a major browser functionality, but what if we could code a search box in JavaScript that would do the same thing? I set out to do that using MooTools and ended up with a pretty decent solution. The MooTools JavaScript Class The...

By Brian GonzalezJanuary 13, 2014

CSS Vertical Centering

Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...