ASCII Art Generator — Image to ASCII & Text to ASCII Art_

A free ASCII art generator, ASCII pictures generator and ASCII text maker

ASCII art is a picture made only of text characters. Because it is plain text, it survives almost anywhere a font is monospaced: a terminal, a server's message of the day, a code comment, a GitHub README or a Discord message. This tool makes it two ways — from an image and from text in banner fonts — entirely inside your browser, with no upload, no account and no watermark. It works as a free alternative to patorjk's TAAG and asciiart.eu, with image conversion, colour and terminal export on top.

Turning a photo into ASCII art

The converter shrinks your image to the number of columns you choose, measures the brightness of each cell and replaces it with a character. In Characters mode dense symbols such as @ and # stand for dark areas and light ones such as . for bright areas; use Detailed (70 characters) for photographs, Standard or Blocks for logos and silhouettes, or type your own dark-to-light sequence under Custom. Braille dots packs a 2×4 grid into every character, so a small piece of art keeps far more detail. Half blocks give each character a top and bottom pixel — switch on colour mode and you get real pixel art. Line art ignores shading and traces edges with slashes and underscores, which suits drawings and logos.

Pictures with one clear subject on a plain background convert best. Portraits improve when you crop tight to the face and raise the contrast until the features separate from the background; Auto-enhance does this for you by stretching the darkest and lightest tones. Dithering helps with smooth gradients such as skies: Floyd–Steinberg is the smoothest, Atkinson is crisper, and ordered 4×4 gives a deliberate retro pattern. If the art looks stretched, lower the char aspect ratio; if it looks flattened, raise it — text characters are about twice as tall as they are wide, which is why 0.50 is the default. Toggle invert when the art will be shown on a light background.

Braille ASCII art, dot art and PNG to ASCII

Braille art (also called ASCII dot art) uses the Unicode Braille characters ⠁ to ⣿, which pack a grid of 2 × 4 dots into every character. That gives eight times the detail of one character per pixel, so faces and logos stay recognisable at small sizes, and it pastes into Discord, Twitch chat, X and Instagram bios like any other text. Pick the Braille mode in image mode, drop a PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP or SVG, and adjust the threshold and dithering until the dots look right; transparent PNGs work well because the empty background stays blank. Half-block mode does the same trick with ▀ and ▄ for coloured terminal art.

Text to ASCII art with real FIGlet fonts

FIGlet fonts draw every letter as a hand-made block of characters — the classic banner style of figlet and TAAG. Type your text, pick one of 294 fonts, and use Preview my text in every font to see your own words in all of them before you choose. Letter spacing controls how tightly letters join (wide, fitted or smushed together), Wrap at keeps long text inside 40–120 columns, and each line of a multi-line text becomes its own banner. The Pixel fonts engine is there for the cases FIGlet cannot cover: it draws any web font, including accents and non-Latin letters, with a single character.

Finished banners can be centred, framed with one of ten borders and wrapped as a comment for your language — // for JavaScript or Go, # for Python and shell scripts, -- for SQL, /* */ for CSS or <!-- --> for HTML — so you can paste a header straight into source code.

Using ASCII art in READMEs, chat and terminals

• GitHub README — press Copy as code block and paste it into README.md. The three backticks keep the spacing intact; about 80 columns avoids horizontal scrolling.
• Discord and Slack — also use a code block, and keep it to 40–60 columns because chat windows are narrow and messages have a length limit.
• Terminal and MOTD — save the .txt into /etc/motd, or use Download .sh for a colour version that prints with 24-bit ANSI colour codes.
• Email, Word, WhatsApp, social media — these use proportional fonts, so text art falls apart there. Export a PNG or SVG instead; both draw braille as real dots and half blocks as solid pixels.

Live webcam ASCII

Want ASCII video instead of a still picture? ASCII Webcam turns your camera into live ASCII in real time, with its own charsets, colour modes and snapshot tools. Pictures you already have go through the image tab here, or through Image to ASCII for a quick drag-and-drop conversion.

Private by design

Images and text never leave your device — there is no server doing the work. Your last ten results are kept in this browser's history strip, and your settings and favourite fonts are remembered locally. After the page has loaded, image and braille conversion keep working offline; FIGlet and Google fonts are small files fetched once the first time you use them.