BLIND-TO-TEXT(1)

📦 version 1.1, in alpine 3.24

💅 BLIND-TO-TEXT(1) — the manual, but make it make sense

okay so bestie, welcome to blind-to-text, a General Commands Manual page that's literally about converting a video to text. yes, really. no cap. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, and let's get into it.

✨ NAME ✨

blind-to-text — Convert a video to text 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

blind-to-text

that's it. that's the whole vibe. no flags, no args, she just runs. icon behaviour honestly 👑

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so here's the tea, bestie 💖 — blind-to-text reads a video from stdin and prints it in text format to stdout. like, the actual video. turned into text. slay.

the first line of the output is the head, and it's giving very much ✨metadata✨. it contains, in this exact order:

  • the number of frames
  • a <space>
  • the width
  • a <space>
  • the height
  • a <space>
  • the pixel format

after the head? that's where it gets juicy 🌸. the output is one line per pixel, and every single one of those lines contains the values of that pixel's colour in textual representation of a floating-point value, each one separated by a <space>.

and the order of those values is, and I cannot stress this enough:

  1. X
  2. Y
  3. Z
  4. alpha

where X, Y, and Z are the parameters of the colour's CIE XYZ representation 🦋. yes, CIE XYZ. she's fancy, she's scientific, she knows her colour spaces. iykyk.

now, the layout — this is the part where you need to lock in 🔥. if the width of the video is w and the height of the video is h, then the first w lines after the head are the pixels in the first row in the first frame of the video. the following w lines are the pixels in the second row, and so on, and so on, until you hit the w*h:th line after the head — and that's exactly where the second frame begins. no skips, no gaps, she's thorough like that 💅

the pixels are printed:

  • from left to right
  • from top to bottom
  • and from first frame to last frame

basically the most natural reading order ever? periodt. 📖✨

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

go read those too bestie, they're the other half of the friend group 🫶

✨ AUTHORS ✨

Mattias Andrée <maandree@kth.se> — the main character who made this whole thing possible 👑💜

ngl this one's short but she's mighty. tiny manpage, huge slay. 🧚

and that's the whole page, bestie! this lil beauty is from blind 1.1 — so when you're out here turning videos into floating-point text like an absolute icon, just remember: blind 1.1 brought you this joy 🌈💖 bye bestie!! 😭🦋

📦 where this page comes from