What are some good ASCII art generators?

Question

I have tried figlet but it's not much good. Are there any other ASCII editors? alt text

what exactly do u mean by ascii editor? I mean every text editor should be able to edit ascii like gedit because ascii is just an encoding for characters — binW, Dec 10 '10 at 08:14
not related, but i remember there being a tool called aa or maybe bb in the knoppix cd, that made ascii vidoes. — theTuxRacer, Dec 10 '10 at 18:23

score 26 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 11 '17 at 19:02

Another good program available in the repositories is jp2a, and there is some good documentation on it at the official site and on the Ubuntu manpage.

It should be said that the program will convert any jpg, but it is best to use simple, logo or cartoon like pictures as they come out much better. If you need to convert your image to jpg beforehand, just use imagemagick's convert utility and run convert logo.png logo.jpg.

There is often a need to fiddle with the jp2a options to specify the characters used, the size of the ascii, or to invert the representation. Once you get the settings right you can get good results, however, as I display in the screenshot below. The results do, however, depend a lot on the image you have chosen to convert to ascii.

As an example, I have used the following command to do an ascii representation of the Ubuntu logo, which displays on the terminal screen and also saves to file: (This assumes the input ubuntu-logo.jpg is in your present working directory)

jp2a -i --chars="..00xx@@" ubuntu-logo.jpg | tee ubuntu-logo.txt

enter image description here

Is there any way to output this automatically to an image? (i.e. without taking a screenshot) — hellocatfood, May 21 '13 at 13:14
@hellocatfood: Yes. `echo -en "hello\nworld" | python3 -c "import sys; from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont; img=Image.new('RGB',(800,600)); draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img); font = ImageFont.truetype('/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeMono.ttf', 20); [draw.text((0, i[0]*20), i[1].rstrip('\n'), (255,255,255), font=font) for i in enumerate(sys.stdin)]; img.save('sample-out.png')" && display sample-out.png` — Janus Troelsen, Nov 29 '13 at 18:02

score 21 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 11 '17 at 19:00

21

TOIlet

I've seen TOIlet, I think that is what you're looking for.

edited Mar 11 '17 at 19:00

Community

1

answered Dec 10 '10 at 06:47

antivirtel

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In terminal it's oke but when i copy that into my text editor.It is not in the original form. – karthick87 Dec 10 '10 at 06:59
1

I believe you need to use a monospaced font for the ASCII art to render properly, you don't get aligned char positions with a variable font. – João Pinto Dec 10 '10 at 09:54
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Is it possible to install monospaced font from repositories? – karthick87 Dec 10 '10 at 11:29
There are several monospaced fonts installed by default. Some of them have "mono" in their name, so should be easy to find. – JanC Dec 10 '10 at 13:37
@JanC if is installed by default.Why it's not appearing properly? – karthick87 Dec 10 '10 at 13:43
when you copy/paste, you don't include the font info... – JanC Dec 10 '10 at 15:46
1

I think, when looking at the TOIlet screenshots, your problem might be different. It seems like it (sometimes) uses colour and non-default characters, which is probably the problem you see, not the lack of a monospaced font. – JanC Dec 10 '10 at 15:47

score 13 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 11 '17 at 19:00

13

If you want a talking cow there is cowsay :

$ cowsay hello!
 ________
< hello! >
 --------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

edited Mar 11 '17 at 19:00

Community

1

answered Dec 10 '10 at 13:46

JanC

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score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 10 '10 at 18:02

4

There are also many cool online converters. Some of them convert text, and some can process ever images! Look at http://www.text-image.com/convert/ or http://ajaxwidgets.com/Ascii-Art/AsciiArt.aspx

Amongst those that deal with text is http://patorjk.com/software/taag/

answered Dec 10 '10 at 18:02

Rafał Cieślak

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Alright but the problem now is when i copy it to my text editor.It was not in the original form. – karthick87 Dec 10 '10 at 18:06
It depends on how did you copy it. Which site did you use? I'll try myself. – Rafał Cieślak Dec 10 '10 at 18:12
Used this site http://patorjk.com/software/taag/ – karthick87 Dec 10 '10 at 18:28
Remember to use proper font. – Rafał Cieślak Dec 10 '10 at 19:57

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 16 '15 at 17:54

Taking a step further, if you like to learn a new command with ascii art generated cartoon character like shown below. demo1 demo2

You can use cowsay utility and put a simple one line to learn new command.

installing cowsay

sudo apt-get install cowsay

add below line to your .bashrc or .zshrc file located at ~/ i.e ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc to get an ascii art character

cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1) $(whatis $(ls /bin) 2>/dev/null | shuf -n 1)

Cheers

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 10 '10 at 12:17

1

There is a Java Application JaVE that does what you are looking for.

Another, CLI based project would be AA-lib.

answered Dec 10 '10 at 12:17

Takkat

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Do you know how you'd save the output of aa-lib to an image _without_ taking a screenshot? – hellocatfood May 21 '13 at 13:24

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 08 '12 at 14:41

1

I love Linux-logo ( http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/linux_logo/ ). Try adding it to the start of any terminal. Try finding the right logo for Ubuntu (-L)...

Have fun!

answered Nov 08 '12 at 14:41

chanio

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Lots of fun, but it's not actually and acii art generator – fabricator4 Nov 18 '12 at 02:21

score 0 · Answer 8 · edited Dec 31 '16 at 07:12

0

I use asciio with my python scripts. How to install:

apt-get install asciio

Imagem asciio

edited Dec 31 '16 at 07:12

muru

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answered Jul 27 '16 at 01:57

Wellington Oliveira

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This is an English site. If you're going to post in spanish, please at least translate your post to English. – anonymous2 Jul 27 '16 at 02:25
You're right. I will try to translate the next. – Wellington Oliveira Jul 27 '16 at 02:28

score 0 · Answer 9 · edited Dec 31 '16 at 09:21

0

I have a 5 year old son who loves asciiquarium. Asciiquarium is a single perl script, so all you have to do is make sure it's executable and put it somewhere convenient, like /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/games.

Additional requirements for Ubuntu

Get perl's curses package which is available from apt.
```
sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl
```
Run cpan from the shell. Agree to the defaults for everything. To leave cpan, type quit
Type:
```
sudo cpan Term::Animation
```

edited Dec 31 '16 at 09:21

karel

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answered Dec 31 '16 at 06:21

jwerre

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Neither searching [by command name](http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=trusty&arch=any&mode=exactfilename&searchon=contents&keywords=asciiquarium) nor searching [by package name](http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=asciiquarium) yielded any results. – muru Dec 31 '16 at 07:10

score -3 · Answer 10 · edited Jun 30 '14 at 17:03

Here is a good ascii art generator: http://asciiart.club

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                    ╙║║║║║║║║║║║║║░ └▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓┘    
               ╔╠░    ║║║║║║║║║║║║║N, └╙╩╩╙└      
             ╔╠╠╠╠╠,   ╚║║║║║║║║║║║║║║M╔╓╓╓#N,    
           ╓╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠∩   ╙╙      └╙╙║║║║║║║║║║║N   
          #╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╚                ╙║║║║║║║║║║  
         ╔╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╚                    ╙║║║║║║║║║ 
  .╓╔╔╓,  ╙╠╠╠╠╠╠╚                      ╙║║║║║║║║Γ
.║║║║║║║║,  ╠╠╠╠╠                        ║║║║║║║║║
║║║║║║║║║║  ╠╠╠╠░                                 
╚║║║║║║║║╠  ╠╠╠╠░                        ╓»»»»»»»»
 ╙╚║║║║╚╙  #╠╠╠╠╠∩                       ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒
         ╔╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠,                    \▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 
         `╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠∩                  #▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓Ñ 
           ╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠              ╓@▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓╜  
            ╙╠╠╠╠╠╠╚   ┌▓▓₧MmmM₧▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓    
              ╙╠╠╠∩   ╓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▀░      └     
                `    #▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓  ╓∩╠╠╠╠∩╔     
                    "▀▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓  #╠╠╠╠╠╠╠╠░    
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                                     ╚╠╠╠╠╠╠╠     
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It can generate in full color from a variety of character sets, from oldskool/amiga to ascii or extended (even braille!), and generates output in HTML, BBCode, Markdown, and even share an image on Imgur with one click.

Try it! -=cP

Hi and welcome to the site. If you post answers suggesting tools you have written or are otherwise involved with, please make sure to always state that in the answer. See [here](https://askubuntu.com/help/promotion) for the site rules about promotion. — terdon, Jul 25 '18 at 18:10

What are some good ASCII art generators?

10 Answers10

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