Ink Weight guide

Overview

Ink Weight writes your picture in characters chosen by how much ink they carry.

A portrait with closed eyes written in pale kanji on a near-black ground, one gold character on the brightest cheek
The sample in the Crow words, Ink on paper, with the spark on.

The tool cuts your picture into square cells, one character each, the way kanji sit in their em square. Where the picture is bright, a cell gets a heavy character such as 鬱; where it is dim, a light one such as 一 or ノ; where it is dark, nothing.

How much of its square a character covers is its ink weight. The tool does not guess it from the stroke count: it draws every character once and counts the ink, its glyph coverage.

The characters come from words you choose, in the script you choose: kanji, Devanagari (Sanskrit), Tamil, Latin or symbols, each with sets of words about one subject, or any characters you type, in any script. They are sorted from light to heavy and spread over the picture's tones so that every one of them is used. See quantile.

Ground leaves the darkest cells empty, and Haze sets a few faint characters back into them. The brightest cell can take one accent character, the Spark.

Columns can run top to bottom and right to left, as Japanese is written by hand (tategaki). The picture can move: it falls into place like rain, is written by hand, gathers in a stream or breathes. You can save a PNG, an SVG with live text, the text itself, or a 5 or 10 second video of the motion.

Open Ink Weight Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need and your first picture in five steps.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree pictures and the settings that made them.
  4. Keep your workPNG, SVG, text, .txt and video.
  5. KeysThe four keys, and what each one does.
  6. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It opens with a sample, a portrait on a dark ground. Try the sample brings it back after you have opened your own picture.

It runs in your browser on a 2D canvas and needs no WebGL. Nothing is uploaded. A mouse, a trackpad and a finger all work.

Latin character ramps, shade blocks and Braille live in ASCII art; a sound drawn in characters is the ASCII visualizer; characters grown from a noise field are Glyph Weave.