Following a quick read of this article on Medium [4], I felt tempted to try my hand at making ASCII art. Well, ASCII art but including Urdu/Arabic characters in it. So in other words, not “ASCII” art at all. This means we’re going beyond the realm of a restrictive 127 character set. Making ASCII art has been tried and done hundreds of times. For this project, I used C++ (my go-to programming language). Upon researching the working principle behind ASCII art [10] and how others approached this in C# [2], Python [4] and JavaScript [3] , I found that implementing an intensity-dependent program is the simplest solution. It can be summed up in 4 steps. 1) Set a char array with several characters sorted by “intensity” 2) Get a grayscale, contrast-adjusted image. 3) Loop through each pixel and select a corresponding character for each pixel, based on the grayscale value (0-255). 4) Print out the corresponding characters. I used the SFML library to load the ima...