ASCII art

Drop a picture and watch it fall apart into letters. Your image never leaves this page. There is nowhere for it to go.

Drop a picture on the slab, paste one, or

Choose a file

120 COLS 0 ROWS 0 CHARS

Columns

120characters across

Characters

Standard@%#*+=-:. ten steps Denseseventy steps, the classic long ramp Blocks█▓▒░ shaded blocks Minimal#+. four steps Your owndark to light, last one usually a space

Custom characters, dark to light

Look

Shadetone becomes character weight Edgesoutlines in | / - \ strokes

Colour, sampled from the picture Invert, if it prints as a negative

Tone

Brightness0

Contrast0

Your settings are kept in this browser. The picture is not.

How it prints

The picture is drawn onto a canvas in your browser and shrunk to a grid of cells, one per character. Each cell's brightness picks a character from the ramp: heavy glyphs like @ and # where there is a lot of ink to lay down, thin ones like . and : where there is little, and a space where there is none. Text cells are about twice as tall as they are wide, so the grid samples half as many rows as a square grid would, and the picture keeps its shape.

On paper, dark parts of the picture get the heavy characters. On the dark sheet that colour mode uses, it is the other way round, because there the character is the light. If a picture comes out as a negative, Invert flips it.

Edges runs a Sobel filter over the same grid and draws a stroke where the tone changes sharply: | across a vertical edge, - across a horizontal one, / and \ for the diagonals. Contrast raises or lowers how sharp a change has to be before it counts.

Getting a good one

Pictures with a clear subject on a plain background print best. Faces want 80 to 140 columns; a landscape can take 200. If the result is muddy, push contrast up until the shapes separate, then bring brightness down a touch. The dense ramp gives smoother tone but reads worse in a fixed-width font that is not this one; the standard ramp is the safe choice for pasting somewhere else.

Copy text gives you the plain characters. The .txt is the same thing as a file. The PNG is the sheet as you see it here, colour included, drawn at twice the size for sharpness.

Banners

Banner mode sets a line of text in one of three fonts drawn for this page: Slab, built from _ | / \ in the old FIGlet spirit; Banner, a 5 by 7 dot matrix in #; and Small, the same idea at four rows. They are original recreations, not the FIGlet font files, and they cover capitals, digits and a little punctuation. Lowercase is set as capitals.

Nothing you drop, paste or type is sent, logged or stored. The only thing this page records is that a render happened, in which mode, at how many columns.