Simple image to ASCII with five characters
A space and four pieces of punctuation. The minimal ramp keeps the same number of steps as the block charset but spends none of them on solid fills — every glyph is plain 7-bit ASCII surrounded by empty paper. The output reads as a sketch rather than as a photograph.
.:*#
rendering minimal portrait…
One space, four marks, no grey
The ramp is a space, then ., :, * and #. The jumps between them are wide, so a value between two slots is rounded, never blended. At 40–80 columns those jumps still draw an edge. A sixty-eight step ramp at the same width puts consecutive glyphs too close together, and the picture turns to speckle.
Raise contrast until the subject separates from the background, and switch invert on when the subject is light on a dark field. All five characters are 7-bit ASCII. The other five ramps are listed on the home page.
Five characters, nothing wasted.
Open the converter with the minimal ramp preselected, drop an image, and pull the column count down until the shape is all that is left. The conversion runs in your own tab and the bytes never leave it.
Open the minimal ASCII converter