JSASCII
It’s always useful to remember that canvas isn’t just a useful tool for display, but can also be used for reading data from images too. Jacob Seidelin’s JSASCII demo is a good example of that, grabbing an image, painting it on a canvas and then using getImageData() to retrieve information on the image. In this case, the data gathered is used to produce some rather great ASCII art.
ASCII art at its finest
There’s a selection of different demos of this technique available on Jacob’s site, together with the JavaScript library and documentation so you can make your own ASCII art!
Related demos