ASCII art guide — settings, width and pasting
Get clean ASCII art from an image: columns, invert, picking photos, and pasting into a GitHub README, terminal or X without breaking.
This guide covers Artgen's ASCII tools in depth. Tool pages: image to ASCII (free fixed effect), text to ASCII art (browser, no sign-in), ASCII to image (browser, no sign-in), copy-and-paste drawings (browser, no sign-in), and AI ASCII (prompt → image → characters).
Image to ASCII: the settings
| Setting | Range / options | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Columns | 24–85 | 80 | Characters per line. More columns = more detail and wider text. |
| Invert brightness | Off / On | Off | Off gives light characters for a dark background; On flips it for light pages. |
The converter maps brightness to ten characters: space . : - + = % * @ #. The same image and settings always give the same result.
Choosing a column count
- GitHub README or chat: start around the low end so lines don't wrap on narrow screens, then go up.
- Terminal: keep it at or below your terminal width (80 columns is a common default).
- Very tall or narrow images may get fewer columns than you set, because the grid follows the image's proportions and the 512 px resize.
Picking an image
Clear subject, strong contrast, plain background. Crop close before uploading — cropping helps more than adding columns. Busy textures and grey, low-contrast photos turn into noise. Transparent areas become white, so a logo on transparency is treated as dark-on-white.
Text to ASCII art
Tool page: text to ASCII art. It runs in your browser. No sign-in required.
Type a word, name or short phrase and the page draws it as large letters made of keyboard characters. The preview updates as you type. Copy the result or download a TXT file.
| Setting | Range / options | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text | up to 80 characters | HELLO | Typed input. Longer lines get wide quickly. |
| Font | Standard, Slant, Big, Doom, Banner, Small, Block, Digital | Standard | Eight banner fonts. Each draws the letters differently. |
Banner fonts cover letters, numbers and common punctuation. Characters a font does not include — including Chinese — are omitted. Presets apply a sample word and a font so you can try a style without typing.
This page draws letters. To turn a photo into characters, use image to ASCII.
ASCII to image
Tool page: ASCII to image. It runs in your browser. No sign-in required.
Paste ASCII art or other monospaced text and download a PNG drawn in a monospaced font, with every space and line break kept. The converter saves PNG only.
| Setting | Range / options | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text color | color picker | #111111 | Character color. |
| Background | color picker | #ffffff | Solid background fill. |
| Padding | 8–64 | 24 | Space around the text. |
| Font size | 10–28 | 14 | Character size in the PNG. |
Tabs expand to 8-column stops so pasted grids keep their column alignment. Use this when a chat app, email or social post would collapse spaces.
Copy and paste drawings
Tool page: ASCII art copy and paste. It runs in your browser. No sign-in required.
A gallery of short text drawings with a copy button on each one. Categories: animals, hearts, faces, nature and objects. Most drawings are original Artgen compositions. The sitting cat, bunny and fish use unattributed public-domain folk ASCII motifs.
Paste into a monospaced font or a Markdown code block. If the destination restyles text, convert the copied drawing with ASCII to image.
AI ASCII: prompt first
AI ASCII uses an AI model to create the source image (uses credits), then converts it to characters for free. Prompt for one recognizable subject, strong contrast and a quiet background, and avoid lettering in the picture. Once the source image is ready, you can change columns or invert and re-run the ASCII step without generating again — keep the page open to reuse it.
Pasting without breaking alignment
ASCII art only lines up in a monospaced font with every space and line break kept.
GitHub README / Markdown
Wrap it in a fenced code block:
```text
your ascii art here
```Without the fence, Markdown collapses spaces and the art falls apart.
Terminal
- Use a monospaced font (terminals already do).
- Turn off line wrapping, or keep columns below the terminal width.
- When printing from a script, write the text as-is; don't strip leading spaces.
X, chat apps and email
Many of these change the font or collapse runs of spaces, so alignment isn't guaranteed. If it matters, post the PNG that the converter gives you alongside the text. Some chat apps support code blocks — try those first.
Code comments
Paste inside a block comment and make sure your editor doesn't auto-trim trailing whitespace on that block.
Troubleshooting
- Art is slanted or jagged after pasting → not monospaced or spaces collapsed. Use a code block or the PNG.
- Lines wrap → lower the column count.
- Just noise → crop tighter, raise contrast before uploading, or pick a simpler image.
- Looks inverted → toggle Invert brightness.
More in Output looks wrong.