ascii.joedoe.dev
A workshop for drawing with letters
Before screens could show pictures, people drew with whatever was on the keyboard. Here are the tools to keep doing it, and the sites I found along the way.
The tools
Convert
Any photo, video or your camera, turned into characters live. With colour, blocks, braille and green phosphor.
Letters
Type something and see it in big letters in 46 FIGlet fonts, ready for a README or a code comment.
Draw
A grid to draw by hand: pencil, lines, boxes, arrows, text, a paint bucket and colours.
Animate
Frame by frame, with onion skin. Out comes a GIF or a page that plays by itself.
Faces
Over two hundred text faces to copy with one click, and a builder to make your own.
Game
Tiznao in ASCII: a map of characters, a militia and a tractor. Playable in the browser.
Archive
The ASCII sites, programs and games I've been saving, sorted and explained.
From the archive
- TAAG (patorjk)Text to ASCII Art Generator: the go-to for big letters, with hundreds of FIGlet fonts.
- REXPaintThe serious ASCII art editor: layers, colours, palettes. Made by Cogmind's author for his roguelikes.
- asciinemaRecord your terminal and share it as text, not video: you can copy from the recording.
- Joan JumpAn ASCII platformer by Adel Faure, one of the loveliest text artists working today.
- ASCII Art ArchiveThe big archive of classic ASCII art, by theme, with the artists' signatures. Plus tools.
- ASCII shader (Codrops)A Codrops tutorial: a WebGL (OGL) 3D scene rendered as ASCII with a shader.