ASCII Art Generator

The text “ZAP” in the “Pixel” style using the “#” character becomes a seven-line banner made entirely of # characters. An image becomes character art that you can set between 20 and 240 characters wide, using, for example, ten or 70 ASCII characters, blocks, or Braille dots. You can copy the result, save it as a text file or PNG, or share the settings as a link.

ASCII art consists of images and lettering made entirely from text characters: letters, digits, and punctuation. The ASCII character set contains 128 characters, 95 of which are printable. ASCII art needs a monospaced font to keep the lines aligned. This generator creates two types: large banners from text and character-based images from photos.

Open “Text to ASCII” mode and enter up to six lines with no more than 120 characters in total. The result appears immediately. Choose one of seven styles: Pixel, Block, Shadow, Compact, Wide, Dots or Mini. For Pixel and Wide, you can also choose the character used to make the letters. Use the slider to set the spacing between letters, and align multiple lines left, center or right.

Switch to “Image to ASCII” and drop an image, click the field or paste it with Ctrl+V. JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF files up to 15 MB are supported, and there’s a sample image to try. The generator divides the image into cells, measures the brightness of each cell and replaces it with a suitable character. A width of 20 to 240 characters determines the level of detail; adjust brightness and contrast to bring out more detail. Portraits and logos with clear edges work well.

True ASCII consists only of the 128 characters in the classic character set. The Pixel, Wide, and Mini styles and the Standard and Detailed character sets produce pure ASCII, as long as you don't choose a special character as your custom character. Block, Shadow, Compact, Dots, Blocks, and Braille use Unicode characters, which some terminals and fonts display differently. A Braille character has eight dots—two wide and four high—so it shows more image detail per character. Dithering makes gradients smoother. Below the result, you'll see whether your output is pure ASCII.

Choose the “Discord and Markdown” format. It puts the art in a code block with three backticks, so Discord and GitHub display it in a monospace font and the lines stay aligned. A Discord message can have at most 2,000 characters; you can see the current length below the result. If it’s too long, choose a smaller width, a smaller style such as Mini, or shorten the text. Without a code block, you need a monospace font such as Courier, Consolas or Menlo. Otherwise, the lines shift out of alignment because an i is narrower than an M.

The generator's font uses pixel characters in a five-by-seven grid, with no room for dots or accents above letters. That's why Ä becomes AE, Ö becomes OE, Ü becomes UE, and ß becomes SS. Other accented letters or letters with additional marks, such as é, ñ, å, or ł, have no dedicated character: they appear as patterned boxes, or as question marks in the Mini style. It's best to write those words without accents. Lowercase letters are drawn as uppercase letters.

Save the text to /etc/motd, and it will appear after login on Debian and Ubuntu. For a banner before login, put it in a file and specify that file under “Banner” in sshd_config. The “Login Banner (Shell)” format gives you a cat command that you can save as a script in /etc/profile.d. On a ZAP-Hosting VPS, you have root access to do this.

No. Conversion takes place in your browser, with no upload or sign-up. The image is only resized and analyzed locally. The settings appear in the address bar so you can share them as a link. In “Text to ASCII” mode, the text itself is also included in the link; an image is never part of the link.

You may use the generated text art freely. Images, however, remain subject to the rights to the original photo, so only use images you have the rights to. FIGlet is a well-known program that renders text as large letters. This generator does not use its fonts, but has its own pixel font with several styles. The gallery contains original drawings that you may also use freely.