Chafa 1.6.0: Wider

Here's another one from the terminal graphics extravaganza dept: Chafa 1.6.0 brings fullwidth character support, so in addition to the usual block elements and ASCII art, you now get some mean CJK art too. Or grab as many fonts as you can and combine all of the Unicode into one big glorious mess. Chafa can efficiently distinguish between thousands of symbols, so it also runs fast enough for animations — up to a point.

Since some users want this in environments where it's not practical to build from source or even to have nice things like GLib, I've started adding statically linked builds. These are pretty bare-bones (fewer image loaders, no man page), so look to your steadfast distribution first.

Speaking of distributions, a big thank you to the packagers. Special thanks go to Florian Viehweger for getting in touch re. adding it to OpenBSD ports, and Mo Zhou (Debian), Michael Vetter (openSUSE), Herby Gillot (MacPorts), @chenrui and Carlo Cabrera (Homebrew) for getting 1.6 out there before I could even finish this post.

So what's it look like?

Obviously if you just want as faithful a reproduction as possible, stick with the default block elements or sixels. That said, fullwidth characters open up some new artistic possibilities.

Above, a rendering of Dog's Head (1920) by Julie de Graag, digitally enhanced by Rawpixel. It was generated with the following command line:

chafa --glyph-file /usr/share/fonts/truetype/SourceHanSansCN-Normal.otf \
  --glyph-file /usr/share/fonts/truetype/SourceHanSansJP-Normal.otf \
  --glyph-file /usr/share/fonts/truetype/DroidSansThai.ttf \ 
  --glyph-file /usr/share/fonts/truetype/SourceCodePro-Regular.ttf \
  --symbols 0..fffff-block-border-stipple-dot-geometric \
  -c none -w 9 dog.png

Although I'd like to include a moderately large built-in selection of fullwidth symbols in a future release, for now you must load fonts with --glyph-file in order to achieve this effect. You also need to enable the Unicode ranges you want and curtail the use of block and border elements with --symbols. The latter is necessary because block elements produce more accurate results and will otherwise pretty much always come out on top during error minimization.

This is a rendering of Shinjuku Skyscrapers, CC-BY-SA Wilhelm Joys Andersen. I used the same set of options to produce it, but left out -c none, resulting in 24-bit color — the default under VTE.

A side effect of allowing lots of color variation is fewer wide characters. This makes sense considering that they force a pair of cells to have the same color, which is often less accurate than two narrow characters with different colors.

彡 (._.) ( l: ) (.-.) ( :l )

Like many subjects that look simple at first, terminal graphics makes for a surprisingly deep rabbit hole to be tumbling into. Chafa now spans the gamut from the most basic monochrome ASCII art to fullwidth Unicode, 24-bit color and sixels, and there's still a lot that can be done to improve it. I will be doing so… slowly.

If you want to help, feel free to send pull requests or file any issues you find. I think it's also at the point where you can achieve various surprising effects, so if you manage to get something particularly cool/sick/downright disgusting out of it, just lob it in my general direction and maybe I'll include it in a future gallery.