ASCII Art Text Generator
Type a word and see it drawn as a multi-line banner made of plain keyboard characters, in four fonts designed for this site. Set the spacing and the character the letters are filled with, then copy the art, copy it inside a Markdown code block, or download it as a .txt file. Free, no sign-up.
Letters, digits and common punctuation. Each line you type becomes its own banner.
One single-width character such as # @ * or █. Emoji are double width and push the letters out of line.
Your ASCII art
# # ##### # # ### # # # # # # # ##### #### # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### ##### ##### ###
29 columns wide · 5 lines
ASCII art only lines up in a monospaced font. Paste it into a code block, a terminal, a source-code comment or a plain-text file.
How to Use the ASCII Art Text Generator
- Type your text. Short works best — a name, a heading, a single word. Each line you type becomes its own banner.
- Choose a font. Block and Shadow draw letters with a fill character; Slim and Small draw them with lines made of
|,_,/and\. - Adjust the spacing and the fill. Put 0 to 3 columns between letters, swap
#for any single character, or draw each letter with itself. - Copy or download. Copy the art as it is, copy it wrapped in a Markdown code block for GitHub, Discord or Slack, or download it as a .txt file.
How the Fonts Work
Each font is a table of small drawings, one per character. The generator looks up every character of your text, lays the drawings side by side with the spacing you chose, and trims the spaces at the ends of the lines so the art pastes cleanly. Block, Slim and Small were designed for this tool; Shadow is Block with a drop shadow worked out letter by letter — every filled cell casts the shadow character one row down and one column to the right, wherever that spot is empty.
| Font | Height | Drawn with | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block | 5 lines | The fill character, # by default | Headings that need to read from across the room |
| Shadow | 6 lines | The fill and shadow characters | A title with a three-dimensional edge |
| Slim | 5 lines | |, _, / and \ | Lighter banners for README files and terminal greetings |
| Small | 3 lines | |, _, /, \ and brackets | Code comments, where three lines of art are plenty |
All four fonts cover A–Z, 0–9, the space and 26 punctuation marks. Lowercase letters are drawn as capitals, accents are dropped (é draws as E and ß as SS), and curly quotation marks and dashes are drawn as their straight ASCII forms. Anything with no drawing — emoji, letters from other alphabets — is left out and listed under the art, so nothing disappears without a word.
Worked Example
With the default settings — Block font, one column between letters, # as the fill — the word Hello comes out 29 columns wide and 5 lines tall: five letters of five columns each, plus four single-column gaps. The Small font draws the same word in 16 columns and 3 lines.
Block
# # ##### # # ### # # # # # # # ##### #### # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### ##### ##### ###
Small
_ _ |_| |_ | | | | | | |_ |_ |_ |_|
Tick Draw each letter with itself and the H is made of H's — a classic look for name banners. A fill of █ (U+2588 FULL BLOCK) gives solid letters, but it is not ASCII, so check it survives wherever you paste.
Where ASCII Art Displays Correctly
ASCII art only works in a monospaced font, where a space is exactly as wide as a #. In a proportional font the spaces shrink, every row drifts by a different amount, and the letters come apart. That one fact decides where it survives:
- Works: terminals and command prompts, code editors, plain-text (.txt) files, source-code comments, and Markdown code blocks on GitHub, GitLab, Discord, Slack and Reddit — use Copy as Markdown code block for those.
- Works with a change: word processors and email, once you set the text in a monospaced font such as Courier New or Consolas and turn off automatic formatting.
- Usually breaks: ordinary chat messages and social-media posts, which use proportional fonts and sometimes collapse runs of spaces, and web pages unless the art sits inside a
<pre>element. - Keep it under 80 columns for terminals and emails. The generator warns you when a banner is wider; put part of the text on a second line.
A Short History of ASCII Art
Pictures made of characters are older than computers: typists composed them on typewriters, and radio-teletype operators traded them in the 1960s and 70s. ASCII — the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, first published in 1963 — fixed the set of printable characters these fonts are drawn with. Line printers printed giant banner letters across stacks of fan-fold paper, and FIGlet, released in 1991, made letter fonts like these a fixture of terminal greetings, source-code headers and README files.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is ASCII art?
- Pictures and lettering made from the printable characters of the ASCII set — letters, digits, punctuation and spaces — arranged on a grid so that together they form a larger image. Text banners like the ones this tool draws are the most common kind.
- Why does my ASCII art look broken after I paste it?
- The place you pasted it uses a proportional font, where characters have different widths, so the columns no longer line up. Paste it into a code block instead — Copy as Markdown code block does this for GitHub, Discord and Slack — or switch the text to a monospaced font such as Courier New.
- How do I put ASCII art in a code comment?
- Prefix every line with the language's comment marker (
//,#or--) or wrap the block in/* */. In C and C++, watch for a line comment that ends in a backslash: the compiler joins the next line onto the comment, which can silently comment out real code. Slim and Small draw some letters with backslashes, so check the line ends before pasting their art into C; Block and Shadow only use a backslash if you choose one as the fill or shadow. - Are these FIGlet fonts?
- No. FIGlet fonts are separate files by many different authors, distributed under their own terms, and this generator does not use them. Block, Slim and Small were drawn for CitationEasy, and Shadow is computed from Block.
- Can I use lowercase or accented letters?
- You can type them, but the fonts draw capitals only: lowercase letters come out as capitals and accents are dropped, so café draws as CAFE. Letters from other alphabets, such as Greek or Cyrillic, have no drawing and are listed under the art as left out.
- What is the best fill character?
#is the safest because it is ASCII and looks dense in every monospaced font.@,*and0give different textures. The full block █ looks solid but is not ASCII. Avoid emoji: they are twice as wide as other characters in most fonts and push each row out of line.