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This may be a case where things are just inherently difficult, but I've ran into a roadblock. I'm working on a simple image to ASCII converter, and instead of writing to the console, I'd like to create a new image with the ASCII characters.

I've tried using the Graphics interface for a buffered image, but it has no native way to handle newline characters, and it seems not straightforward to handle that formatting on my own. Is there a straightforward way to do this? Here's a snippet of the unfinished method, compressBrightness() just converts from rgb vals to grayscale, and compresses down to a range of 70 vals since that's the amount of chars i have for conversion

        int[] brightnessVals = CompressBrightness(image);
        String pixelsAsASCII = "";
        for (int i = 0; i < brightnessVals.length; i++) {
            int pixelBrightness = brightnessVals[i] &0xff;
            pixelsAsASCII += gradient[pixelBrightness];
            if(i % image.getWidth() == 0 && i != 0){
                pixelsAsASCII += "\n";
            }
        }
        if(DEBUG){
            System.out.println(pixelsAsASCII);
            }

        BufferedImage ASCIIImage = new BufferedImage(image.getWidth() * 8, image.getHeight() * 21, image.getType());
        Graphics AASCIRenderer = ASCIIImage.getGraphics();
        Font renderFont = new Font("Monospaced", Font.PLAIN,12);
        AASCIRenderer.setFont(renderFont);
        AASCIRenderer.setColor(Color.WHITE);
        AASCIRenderer.drawString(pixelsAsASCII)