[snackbroken]

> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer.

Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg40RWiaHRY

[zahlman]

I can imagine there's room for "style", here, too. Just like how traditional 2d computer art varies from having thick borders and sharp delineations between colour regions, through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaroscuro style that seems to achieve soft edges despite high contrast, etc.