ASCII art, or text art, is a form of art that consists of images that are made of pure characters and symbols we use to read and write from ASCII Standard, hence its name ASCII art. This kind of art was used to illustrate graphics in the early printers which often lacked graphics ability and it was also used in early e-mails when images embedding was impossible. As ASCII art is pieced together with characters and symbols, so you can create and edit ASCII art by using a text editor or simply generate with online ASCII art generators. Then you can post them everywhere easily on your Facebook profiles pages, blogs, forum signatures etc. Here are 5 online ASCII art generators you can use for free with registration or signup.
1 Mastervb
The ASCII art generator from mastervb.net allows you to convert either an image or text to ASCII art. To convert an image, simply enter the URL of an image and enter your desired quality and size and then hit “create” button and an image will be shown below. To convert text to ASCII art, just enter your text and choose a font to create.
2 Text ASCII Art Generator
This tool from patorjk.com lets you convert text to ASCII art with up to 30 fonts. Other features include text alignment, smashing letter together, background color, text color or generating an image of the ASCII art. By the way, if you want to see your ASCII art in all its 30 fonts, you just need to select “text all” options on the left and avoid clicking on every font.
3 picascii
Picascii allows to easily convert an image from your computer or a URL to ASCII art. Other features include size, color and HTML code and txt for the ASCII art. Note that the color of the art will only be maintained by using HTML code. If you just paste txt version, you get it only in black. You can upload images in gif, jpeg and png format no more than 1MB. It is also suggested to use images that have some dark levels to get better ASCII effects and images less than 500 pixel are preferred such as avtar
4 asciiomatic
Asciiomatic from typoganism.com is anther tool that will convert an image from either from their gallery or a URL to ASCII art. Your uploaded image can only be in JPG and must be 60×50 in dimension. You can set the output in black and white or in color, in letters or in squares. Then after that, you can generate its HTML code to use it in other places. asciiomatic comes with an app for iPhone users, which converts you photos to various ASCII art and then you can save them to photo library or share via email, Facebook etc.
5 text-image.com
Text-image.com lets you upload images in BMP, GIF, JPG or PNG format and it will convert into ASCII art. Options includes text color, background color, image inverting, extra contrast and image width. Apart from that, they also allows you to upload and convert images to matrix based and html based ASCII art, which will have more flexibilities such as specifying the characters, character colors etc. But thy can only be used in html code or images in order it to be shown correctly.
