TL;DR

Accidentally, this is the biggest visual upgrade that this project has ever had

Context

This started off as an attempt to remove "duplicate" sprite images - I was a little suspicious when I saw that there were 1,000+! (out of ~5000 total images)

Upon further inspection, I noticed that there could possibly even be more duplictes, as many images look similar but are positioned slightly differently in the original PNG (due to padding).

I created a command to "autocrop" the images first to deal with this, and now the sprites look a lot more bright and detailed! 🎉

The benefit of cropping the PNGs first in the conversion pipeline seems to be twofold:

1. The images are centred better, and converted more consistently.
   Previously, for 2 images that are almost exactly the same, but positioned differently on the backend, could have been different text characters after conversion
2. img2xterm seems to like converting the images without all the white/transparent background, it appears to have been adjusting the contrast accordingly

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Changes

• Install imagemagick in docker image
• Use convert command to "trim" the background automatically
• Then convert PNG -> terminal format
• Then add some padding, and remove empty lines

Examples

• All examples are created side-by-side in the same terminal program and session. I opened 2 tmux panes and called the old (left) and new (right) versions of pokesay. These examples roughly represent the impact of the visual upgrade that users will experience

example	img
ivysaur
pikachu
charmander