About ASCII Art Generator
ASCII Art Generator is a small, independent set of free tools for making ASCII and text art in the browser. It started from a simple wish: an ASCII art generator that handles photos, videos and a live camera in one place, looks good, runs fast, and never asks you to upload a personal picture to a server you know nothing about.
What the tools do
- The ASCII art generator converts images, videos and your webcam into characters, with live controls for width, character set, color, contrast, edges and dithering.
- Image to ASCII, video to ASCII and webcam to ASCII use the same engine, tuned for each source.
- The text art generator and the ASCII font generator turn words into large letters with FIGlet fonts.
- The ASCII message generator frames messages in boxes, banners and speech bubbles.
- Text art copy and paste is a gallery of ready-made pieces drawn for this site.
How the ASCII art generator works
The picture is first reduced to a grid with one cell per character. For each cell, the converter averages the pixels, applies your brightness, contrast and gamma settings, optionally adds Sobel edge detection and dithering, and picks the character whose amount of ink matches best. That part runs in JavaScript and handles even a 300-character-wide video frame in a few milliseconds.
Drawing the result is the heavy part, because every character needs to be painted as a small image. When your browser supports WebGPU, a fragment shader on your graphics card draws all characters in a single pass from a glyph atlas, which keeps live video and webcam smooth. In browsers without WebGPU, the same atlas is drawn with Canvas 2D. Downloads (PNG, GIF and video) are produced in the browser too.
Your pictures stay private
No image, video, camera frame or typed text is ever uploaded. There is no server-side processing at all: once the page has loaded, the tools keep working even without an internet connection. See the Privacy Policy for the details, including the services that load fonts and host the site.
Credits
Text banners use figlet.js by Patrick Gillespie (MIT license) and FIGlet fonts created by many designers since 1991, starting with Glenn Chappell and Ian Chai's original FIGlet. Animated GIFs are encoded with gifenc by Matt DesLauriers (MIT license). The interface uses the JetBrains Mono, Space Grotesk and Inter typefaces from Google Fonts. The sample pictures shown before you upload anything are drawn in code, and the gallery art was drawn for this site.
Supported browsers and devices
- Desktop: current Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Brave on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. Chrome and Edge use WebGPU for the fastest live preview.
- Phones and tablets: iPhone, iPad and Android in current browsers, including the front camera for webcam ASCII.
- Video formats: whatever your browser can play. MP4 (H.264) and WebM are the safest choices.
- Recording: GIF works everywhere; video recording uses your browser's MediaRecorder and produces WebM or, in Safari, MP4.
How ASCII Art Generator is funded
The tools are free and will stay free. The site may show a small number of ads to pay for hosting and development. Ads never cover the converter, and nothing you convert is ever used for advertising, because it never leaves your browser.
Contact
Found a bug, a browser where something looks wrong, or have an idea for a new character set, font or gallery category? Email us. Please include your browser and device, and for display problems the settings you used.