Which image formats work?

Anything your browser can decode, which covers JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP and AVIF. You can also paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard.

How do I get a good result from a photograph?

Use a picture with a clear subject and a plain background, and raise the column count. Faces work best when they fill the frame; a busy background spends detail on things you do not care about.

ASCII Art Generator

Q: Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The image is decoded and converted by WebAssembly running on your own machine. It never leaves the browser, and the page works with the network disconnected once it has loaded.

Q: What is the difference between ASCII art and ANSI art?

ASCII art uses only the 95 printable ASCII characters and no colour, so it pastes into a README, a commit message or a terminal. ANSI art adds the CP437 block and shade characters and 16 colours, which is what bulletin board artists used and what looks closest to the original photograph.

Turn a photograph into ASCII art or 16-colour ANSI art. The conversion runs in your browser, so your image is never uploaded.

Drop an image here or click to choose one, or paste from the clipboard

Output Width 100 columns Fine ramp (70 characters) Invert (for a light background)

ASCII art or ANSI art?

ASCII art uses only the 95 printable characters every machine has, and no colour. One character is chosen per cell purely on brightness, from a ramp running dark to light. That is what makes it legible: the eye reads the density rather than the letters. It pastes into a README, a commit message, an email signature or a terminal.

ANSI art adds the CP437 block and shade characters and 16 colours, which is what bulletin board artists drew with. Here the character, the foreground and the background are chosen together and scored against the original in a perceptual colour space, so it comes far closer to the photograph than a character ramp can.

Sixteen colours, chosen for your picture

A VGA card could produce 262,144 colours and show any 16 at once, so the fixed DOS palette was a default rather than a limit. In ANSI mode this picks the 16 for each individual image and snaps them to what the hardware could actually display, which is what the XBIN format was invented for in 1996. On a portrait it makes more difference than doubling the resolution.

Nothing is uploaded

Most converters for this send your photograph to a server. This one does not, and cannot: the decoder is your browser's own and the converter is Rust compiled to WebAssembly running on your machine. Load the page, disconnect from the network, and it still works.

Getting a good result

A clear subject on a plain background beats a busy scene. Detail spent on clutter is detail not spent on the face.
Raise the column count for more detail, but remember the output has to fit wherever you are pasting it. 80 columns is the traditional width and fits a terminal.
Turn on Invert if the art will sit on a white page, so dark characters carry the shadows.
Crop tightly before converting. The tool works with what you give it.

Frequently asked

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. It never leaves your browser.

Which formats work?

Anything your browser can decode: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP and AVIF. You can paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard.

Can I use the output commercially?

The output is yours. The tool adds no watermark and claims nothing.

Part of bbs.dbhq.uk, a bulletin board that renders the live web as ANSI, built by DBHQ. The converter is open source.