ASCII Art Generator

How the ASCII Art Generator works

ASCII art generator: what to know first

ASCII art banners are one of the oldest conventions in software and one of the few that never went away. They are still the first thing a command line tool prints, still the header at the top of a README, and still how a monospaced block of text gets to look deliberate rather than accidental. The reason they persist is that they need nothing: no image, no font file, no colour support and no Unicode. A banner drawn from # renders identically in a terminal, a plain-text email, a git commit message, an /* */ comment block and a log file — all the places an image cannot go.

How the letters are drawn. Each supported character has a bitmap seven rows tall and five columns wide. The generator lays the bitmaps out side by side, filling the on pixels with your fill character and leaving the off pixels as spaces, then joins each row into a line. That is exactly how the classic Unix figlet program works, minus the hundreds of fonts — a seven-row height is the sweet spot where every letter stays legible and the banner still fits in a standard 24-row terminal with room to spare.

Choosing a fill character changes the weight more than you would expect. # is the default because it is dense and reads as solid at a glance. █ gives a genuinely solid block if you are confident about Unicode support, * looks lighter and more old-school, = reads as a line rather than a mass, and a letter like o or x gives a dotted, plotter-like look. A single character is the right choice; if you type several, only the first is used, because a banner drawn from a multi-character fill loses its column alignment immediately.

Letter spacing is the other control worth touching. One column of space between letters is correct for a short word. Add a second for a long phrase that reads as a solid wall, or drop to zero for a deliberately cramped, tightly-packed look where the letters almost touch. Because every character is the same width, the total width is entirely predictable: five columns per character plus your spacing between each one, which is how you work out in advance whether a phrase will fit inside eighty columns.

Keep it short. The practical limit is your line width, not the tool. At the default spacing, ten characters comes to just under sixty columns, which fits comfortably in every terminal and inside a GitHub README without wrapping. Twelve is about the maximum before an eighty-column terminal starts folding lines, and a folded banner is worse than no banner. Split a long phrase into two banners on separate lines instead of stretching one across the screen.

Supported characters are A to Z, the digits zero to nine, space, and the punctuation marks that actually turn up in a project name: full stop, hyphen, colon, slash, plus, exclamation mark and question mark. Lowercase input is drawn as uppercase, because a five-by-seven grid does not have the vertical room for ascenders and descenders as well as capitals. Anything unsupported is drawn as a space and counted in the readout so you know it was dropped rather than mangled.

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