Colorir438

Colorir438 is a tiny editor for its own simple image format made to draw and visualize small images/pixel arts on the Command Prompt by mimicking pixels using two ASCII 219 characters together (██).

Table of contents

• Editor
  • Paint commands
  • Image commands
  • File commands
• The Colorir438 (.c438) file format
  • Format
  • Definitions
  • Example
• Additional features
  • Bitmap support
  • Directly visualizing images
• Opening and running the project
• Download
• Built with
• Acknoledgements

Editor

You can edit images by using the editor commands. Use a command by pressing its case insensitive key shortcuts:

• A (Help): Show a list of commands and its shortcuts.

Paint commands

• 1 or P (Point): Paints one pixel.
• 2 or L (Line): Draws an one pixel wide line from a pixel to another.

Image commands

• 4 or B (Background): Changes the background color.

• Arrow keys (Change size): Resizes the image from the right or bottom corner.

• 5 or M (Move): Move the entire image to one direction.

• 8 or V (Visualize): Displays the image with its color background and without the editor's rulers.

File commands

• Esc or S (Exit): Exits the editor and returns to the main menu.

The Colorir438 (.c438) file format

Sometimes editing with the editor can be slow, but with the Colorir438 format it's easy to edit the images manually with any text editor.

Format

When you open a .c438 file with a text editor, you will find something within this format:

Colorir438 <Image height> <Image width> <Background color>
<Matrix of pixels (characters)>

Definitions

• Colorir438 : Case sensitive characters sequence that Colorir438.exe uses to identify the file and start reading it with the Colorir438 format.

• Image height: A positive integer which tells the height in "pixels" of the image. Recommended to be <= 300.

• Image width: A positive integer which tells the width in "pixels" of the image. Recommended to be <= 100.

• Background color: The character that represents a color that the Command Prompt will change its background to while visualizing the image. The available characters are:

  • [0-9]|[A-F]: An hexadecimal digit. Available colors: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F.
  • - (dash): You can disable the change in the background color by using a dash instead of one of the above. The background then will not change and it will be the normal current color of the cmd's background.

• Matrix of pixels: A sequence of characters where each character represents a pixel. Line breaks are ignored. The available characters are:

  • [0-9]|[A-F]: An hexadecimal digit. Available colors: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F.
  • (space): You can mark a pixel as transparent with an space, it will then be covered by the background color.

Example

Using the definitions above, a .c438 file containing the below will result on the image:

Colorir438 16 16 F
     000000     
   00CCCCFF00   
  0FFCCCCFFFF0  
 0FFCCCCCCFFFF0 
 0FCCFFFFCCFFF0 
0CCCFFFFFFCCCCC0
0CCCFFFFFFCCFFC0
0FCCFFFFFFCFFFF0
0FFCCFFFFCCFFFF0
0FFCCCCCCCCCFFC0
0FCC00000000CCC0
 000FF0FF0FF000 
  0FFF0FF0FFF0  
  0FFFFFFFFFF0  
   0FFFFFFFF0   
    00000000    

You can find more examples in the samples/ project folder.

Additional features

Bitmap support

Colorir438 supports most bitmap files (.bmp) through wernsey/bitmap, see specific compatibility.

Directly visualizing images

You can quickly open a pop-up console to visualize a image file:

Explorer's "Open With"

• Right click on the file, click on "Open With" and select Colorir438.exe
• Drag the file on the executable

Path argument

Colorir438.exe will try to open the image located in the path given by the first argument, so running in the cmd the command Colorir438 path/to/image will launch a pop-up console showing the image. Example:

Opening and running the project

1. Install Pelles C (compatible with 9.0.0).
2. Open Colorir438.ppj.
3. Click on Execute (Ctrl+F5).

Download

Direct Download v0.4.1 | Releases

Built with

• _textcolor and _textbackground functions from the Pelles C conio.h.
• wernsey/bitmap

Acknowledgements

This project was inspired by the Coloring (IED-001) slideshow by Prof. Dr. Silvio do Lago Pereira of FATEC-SP's TI dept.