Skip to content

TrickWork

A free, open-source ASCII art generator. TrickWork turns an image into proportional-font-aware ASCII art, with a live preview and export to TXT, XHTML, RTF and PNG. It runs as a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, or as a self-hosted Docker container.

TrickWork converting an image to ASCII art, dark theme

What makes it different

Characters are picked by how much visual ink they cover at the font you chose, not by brightness alone, so proportional fonts render correctly instead of looking stretched or squashed. Most image-to-ASCII tools (chafa, ascii-image-converter, jp2a, img2txt) run on the command line, assume a monospace font and show no preview. TrickWork is the feature set of the abandoned ASCGen2, rebuilt: a live preview, proportional-width awareness and several export formats in one tool.

Features

  • Live preview: every slider, the character set and the font update the preview at once.
  • Image adjustments: crop, rotate and flip, levels, brightness and contrast, invert, dithering, colour output and sharpening.
  • Batch queue: drop several images at once; each converts and exports on its own, and one bad file never blocks the rest.
  • Four export formats: plain TXT, a styled XHTML document, RTF in a fixed monospace font, and a rendered PNG, the one format that keeps a proportional font's look exactly.
  • Ten character sets: nine of ASCII Gen 2's original ramps, verified against its source, a 70-character detailed ramp, or your own string. A character repeated in a ramp claims a larger share of the brightness range, as in the original.
  • Four fonts, two monospace and two proportional, from the fonts already on your system.
  • Automatic downscaling of very large images keeps the preview fast. The queue marks an image that was downscaled.
  • 26 languages, a light and a dark theme, and appearance settings for corners, colours, motion and button labels.
  • Stateless: no database, no accounts, nothing to configure beyond the port.

Get it

Every download is the latest release; the release notes list what changed.

TrickWork in the light theme

Where the name comes from

"Tricking" is the heraldic practice of sketching a coat of arms in outline and marking its colours with letter abbreviations instead of paint, which is close to what this tool does to a picture.

Credits and license

TrickWork is inspired by ASCGen2, written in C#/.NET under the GPLv2 and abandoned since 2015. It shares the idea and none of the code. The look is GlimStone, the design language every app of this house shares.

The helmet in the README's screenshots is a close helmet by Hans Maystetter from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which released the photo under CC0.

Copyright (C) 2026 Junker der Provinz. TrickWork is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. You may run, study, share and change it. If you distribute it, or run a changed version as a network service, you must publish your source under the same terms and keep the existing copyright and attribution notices.

The license covers the source code only. The name TrickWork, its logo and its branding stay reserved, so a fork or derivative needs a name and branding of its own and may not present itself as TrickWork.