Great breakdown and visuals. Most ASCII filters do not account for glyph shape.

It reminds me of how chafa uses an 8x8 bitmap for each glyph: https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa/blob/master/chafa/interna...

There's a lot of nitty gritty concerns I haven't dug into: how to make it fast, how to handle colorspaces, or like the author mentions, how to exaggerate contrast for certain scenes. But I think 99% of the time, it will be hard to beat chafa. Such a good library.

EDIT - a gallery of (Unicode-heavy) examples, in case you haven't seen chafa yet: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/gallery/