asciitopgm

Convert ASCII art to PGM

$ asciitopgm [width] [height] < [ascii.txt] > [output.pgm]

asciitopgm width height [asciifile]

asciitopgm converts ASCII art text to PGM (Portable Graymap) image format. It maps characters to grayscale values based on their visual density, creating an image from text.
This is useful for converting legacy ASCII artwork to modern image formats or for creating images from text patterns.

width

Output image width in pixels

Output image height in pixels

Input ASCII file (or stdin)

Character-to-grayscale mapping may not produce optimal results for all ASCII art styles. Output dimensions must be specified manually.

asciitopgm is part of the Netpbm image processing toolkit, which evolved from PBMPLUS in the late 1980s.

pgmtopbm(1), pnmtopng(1), img2txt(1)