artem 2.0.0
artem 2.0.0
A new version of artem has been released. artem is an image-to-ASCII converter. This release brings various performance and code improvements, as well as full Unicode support, which makes images like this possible.
Overall, artem should now be 10-16% faster.
CLI
The -h flag has been changed to show the help information instead of resizing the image to the terminal height. To use the terminal height, the --height flag is still available. Due to an upgrade of the underlying CLI crate, the help output should now also be more readable.
As mentioned earlier, it is now possible to use artem with Unicode characters using --characters "🙂" or just -c "🙃" for short. Note that the usual rules for using a custom character set apply, see the man page or use the --help command to learn more. In addition, many Unicode characters such as emoticons, have a different size than standard ASCII characters, so using both can cause distortion.
Using artem as a crate
If you've ever tried to use artem version 1 as a library and looked at its docs.rs page, you may have noticed a warning, stating that artem should not be used as a library. This did not stop people from using it, so version 2 provides more explicit support. It now provides sample code for converting an image, and the Option which is used to configure the conversion has been renamed to Config so that it no longer conflicts with the with rust's built-in Option.
Previously convert() took the configuration by value, so to convert multiple images with the same configuration it was necessary to either clone the config or rebuild it. rebuild it each time. Now it just takes a reference to the config.
Migration to V2
If you're already use artem, all you have to do is replace OptionBuilder with ConfigBuilder and pass it as a reference to convert().
Future
As -h is commonly used as a shorthand for help, the --height function currently lacks a short alias.
A lot of time is currently spent on colouring the output. artem uses coloured, which checks each time it is invoked whether the string should be coloured. In artems case this is every single character that is converted/printed, which adds up. As only small part of the whole feature set is used, it should be possible to include it directly in artem.