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~/charsets/standard · ten shades

Image to ASCII with the standard ramp

The character set most people picture when they hear ASCII art: ten glyphs running from empty space to a solid at-sign. It is the safest output Semaphore produces — every character is plain 7-bit ASCII, so it survives any font, any terminal and any code review comment.

.:-=+*#%@

Convert an image compare with braille

semaphore --charset standard – □ ✕

rendering standard portrait…

[ how_the_ramp_works ]

How does the standard ramp map brightness to characters?

The ramp is the ten characters .:-=+*#%@, ordered by ink. Each cell is one Rec. 709 luma value, and that value picks one of the ten: a dark cell is a space, a mid-tone lands on = or +, a highlight on % or @. All ten are 7-bit ASCII.

Start at 100–140 columns. Below that the ten steps still read, and the mid-tones hold if you raise contrast. The full comparison of all six charsets is on the home page.

Ten characters is all it takes.

Open the converter with the standard ramp preselected, drop a photo, and tune columns and contrast live. Your image bytes never leave the tab.

Open the standard ASCII converter