No plans to build a library right now, but who knows. Feel free to grab what you need from the website's code!
If I were to build a library, I'd probably convert the shaders from WebGL 2 to WebGL 1 for better browser compatibility. Would also need to figure out a good API for the library.
One thing that a library would need to deal with is that the shape vector depends on the font family, so the user of the library would need to precompute the shape vectors with the input font family. The sampling circles, internal and external, would likely need to be positioned differently for different font families. It's not obvious to me how a user of the library would go about that. There'd probably need to be some tool for that (I have a script to generate the shape vectors with a hardcoded link to a font in the website repository).
The resulting ASCII looks dithered, with sequences like e.g. :-:-:-:-:. I'd guess that it's an intentional effect since a flat surface would naturally repeat the same character, right? Where does the dithering come from?
Yeah, this is good to point out. The primary constraint I was working around was "this needs to run at a smooth 60FPS on mobile devices" which limits the type and amount of work one can do on each frame.
I'd probably arrive at a very different solution if coming at this from a "you've got infinite compute resources, maximize quality" angle.
Author here. There isn't a library around this yet, but the source code for the blog is open source (MIT licensed): https://github.com/alexharri/website
The code for this post is all in PR #15 if you want to take a look.