What the ASCII message generator makes
Plain text can still look special. A greeting in a double-line frame, a warning in a box of hash signs, a welcome note in large letters or a joke told by a little ASCII cat all stand out in a chat, a terminal or a log file, and they work in places where images are not allowed. Building them by hand is fiddly: every line has to be padded to the same width and every corner has to meet. This ASCII message generator does the counting for you.
There are three families of styles:
- Boxes draw a frame around your text with single, double, rounded or heavy Unicode lines, or with plain keyboard characters (
+ - |, stars or hash signs). - Big letters render the message in a compact FIGlet font, either on its own or inside a hash-sign banner.
- Speech bubbles put your text in a bubble above a small character drawn for this site: a cat, a robot, an owl or a ghost.
How to make an ASCII message
- Type your message. Use Enter for a new line. Short lines work best.
- Choose a style from boxes, big letters or speech bubbles.
- Set alignment and padding. Center looks best for greetings; left suits lists and notices.
- Choose where to wrap. 40 characters fits phones and chat windows; 60 suits wider screens and code.
- Copy it as plain text, a Discord code block or a Reddit indented block, or download .txt or .png.
Ideas for ASCII messages
| Occasion | Suggested style |
|---|---|
| Birthday or congratulations in a group chat | Double line box, centered, or Cat says… |
| Server rules or a pinned announcement | Heavy box, left aligned, wrap at 60 |
| Welcome message on a server login (MOTD) | Banner with big text |
| Warning in a configuration or log file | Hash box, plain ASCII only |
| Section header in source code | Plain ASCII box or Stars |
| Fun reply or a quote | Robot, Owl or Ghost says… |
Box drawing characters explained
The smooth frames use Unicode box drawing characters, a block of symbols designed in the days of text-mode screens for exactly this purpose: ─ │ ┌ ┐ └ ┘ for single lines, ═ ║ ╔ ╗ ╚ ╝ for double lines, ╭ ╮ ╰ ╯ for rounded corners and ━ ┃ ┏ ┓ for heavy lines. They join seamlessly in monospaced fonts. If your message will be read in an old terminal, an email client set to plain ASCII, or a system with an unknown encoding, choose the Plain ASCII, Stars or Hash style instead, which only use characters found on every keyboard.
Getting messages to line up
The ASCII message generator pads every line to the same width, so the frame is perfectly straight in any monospaced font. Problems only appear when the text is shown in a proportional font, or when the message contains characters that take up two cells, such as emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. Use code blocks (the Discord and Reddit copy formats add them automatically), avoid emoji inside frames, and use the PNG download when you need a guaranteed result.
ASCII messages in code and terminals
For a message of the day on a Linux server, save the result as .txt and copy it to /etc/motd. For a banner printed by a script, store it in a file and print it with cat. For a header in source code, start every line with your language's comment symbol, or use the text art generator, which adds comment prefixes automatically.
More text art
Need bigger letters? Compare dozens of styles in the ASCII font generator. For ready-made hearts, animals and dividers to add to your message, browse text art copy and paste. To turn a picture into characters, use the ASCII art generator.