man ascii-art
What is ASCII art?
ASCII art is a picture made from text characters. Letters, digits and symbols are arranged on a fixed-width grid so that, seen from a little distance, their shapes and density form an image or big lettering.
/\_/\ ( o.o ) > ^ <
+++:
+#%%%%%##*+-
:#@@@@@%%%##**:
#@@@@@%%%###**+-
+%%%%%%%####**+:-.
+#########***+:--.
**###*****+::---
++**++++::---.
-:::-----._ _ | |__ (_) | '_ \| | | | | | | |_| |_|_|
A short history
Pictures made of type are older than computers: typists in the late 1800s already composed images on typewriters. In 1966 Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon at Bell Labs printed one of the first computer-generated images built from symbols, and teleprinter and line-printer art spread through computer rooms in the 1960s and 1970s. The ASCII standard of 1963 gave everyone the same 95 printable characters, which made the art portable.
In the 1980s and 1990s, bulletin board systems turned it into a scene: groups drew logos in ANSI art using the block characters of the IBM PC. Usenet signatures, email and newsgroups carried line art, Scott Fahlman proposed the :-) emoticon in 1982, and Japanese forums developed their own art style. FIGlet (1991) automated big lettering, and libraries such as AAlib later rendered whole videos as text.
Character sets
Classic ASCII art uses only printable ASCII, ordered by how much ink each glyph covers, for example .:-=+*#%@ from light to dark. Extended sets add the shading blocks ░▒▓█ and box-drawing lines, while Unicode offers Braille dot patterns with eight dots per character. Adding color codes turns text art into ANSI art.
Where ASCII art is used today
- Banners in READMEs, code comments, CLI tools and server login messages.
- Chat art and reactions on Discord, Twitch and in forums.
- Retro and hacker aesthetics in web design, music videos and animated ASCII loops.
- Places with no images at all: terminals, plain-text email and log output.
Frequently asked questions
- Is ASCII art the same as text art?
- Mostly. Strictly, ASCII art uses only the 95 printable ASCII characters. Text art made with Unicode blocks, Braille dots or Japanese characters is often still called ASCII art in everyday use.
- Why does ASCII art break when I paste it?
- It needs a monospace font, where every character has the same width, and its spaces must be preserved. Paste it into a code block, a terminal or a plain-text editor.
- How do I make ASCII art from a picture?
- Use a converter: it measures the brightness of small areas of the image and swaps each one for a character of matching density. asciify.art does this in your browser.