Drop an image or type text to generate ASCII art — everything is rendered locally in your browser and never leaves your device.
Character set & output options
Banner text — 24 FIGlet fonts
Big-letter banner styles. Block, Banner and Small are built in and work instantly — even offline. More FIGlet fonts (Star Wars, Ghost, Doom…) load from a CDN when you're online.
How it works
- Text mode renders your text to a hidden canvas, then samples brightness into characters. Image mode does the same directly from an uploaded photo or graphic.
- Character sets go from lightest to darkest — "Detailed" gives the smoothest gradients, "Blocks" and "Binary" give a more graphic, stylized look. Type your own ramp with "Custom…".
- Width controls how many characters wide the output is — higher width means more detail but a wider result that needs more horizontal scroll or a smaller font to view fully.
- Color output samples the actual pixel color per cell and applies it to that character — copy as text loses color (plain terminals can't show it), but you can screenshot the on-screen result or use "Copy as text" for the plain version.
- Everything runs locally in your browser — uploaded images are never sent anywhere.
Why ASCII was a major shift
Early computers did not automatically agree on how numbers should represent letters. ASCII provided a shared character-code system. Original ASCII is 7-bit, giving 128 code positions. Its legacy remains visible in modern character encodings.
Pictures before graphical screens
Text terminals and printers could display characters long before rich computer graphics became ordinary. Arranging characters such as #, @, / and spaces allowed people to suggest brightness, edges and shapes using equipment designed only for text.