ASCII art guide

Overview

ASCII art redraws a picture with text characters instead of pixels.

The AIKIZI logo in red and blue shade blocks, with its blue shadow, on a black ground
The larger sample in Blocks and Full RGB with Invert on, at font size 12.

The tool cuts your picture into a grid. Each cell stands for a small block of pixels, averaged into one colour and one brightness. See cell averaging and luminance.

The brightness picks a character from a ramp, a short row that runs from a space to a heavy mark such as @. On the dark background the page opens with, bright cells get the heavy marks. How dark a mark reads is its glyph density.

A cell is twice as tall as it is wide, because characters are taller than they are wide. See character aspect.

There are five character sets: plain ASCII, a longer detailed set, shade blocks, Braille dots and a set you type yourself. The text can be white, green, one of 16 terminal colours, or the picture's own colours. Outlines can be drawn with slashes and bars, or with Braille dots, by edge detection.

You can copy the text, or save it as a text file, a PNG or a web page.

Open ASCII art Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need and your first text picture in five steps.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree pictures and the settings that made them.
  4. Keep your workText, .txt, PNG, HTML and a copied image.
  5. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It opens with the AIKIZI logo, 192 pixels square. Try the sample brings the same logo back after you have opened your own picture.

It runs in your browser on a 2D canvas and needs no WebGL. Nothing is uploaded. A mouse, a trackpad and a finger all work.