Image to ASCII

Image to ASCII turns a picture into a drawing made of characters: each cell of the image becomes a character, and rows of characters build up into a recognizable portrait, logo, or view.

Which drawing type to pick

The "Characters" type draws classic ASCII art. A dark cell of the image becomes a dense character like @ or #, a light one turns into a space or a period. There are eight character sets, from a standard set of 10 characters to a detailed set of 70, including blocks, Cyrillic letters, and a matrix of zeros and ones. You can also enter your own set. Type the characters in any order; the page arranges them from light to dense on its own and adds the space for you. On small drawings and smooth gradients, dithering helps: it renders halftones by alternating characters.

"Braille dots" build the drawing differently. One Braille character holds a 2 × 4 grid, that is, eight separate dots, while a regular character carries one brightness value per cell. That is why fine details like facial features, hair, and outlines come out noticeably sharper, and for portraits this type works better than the rest. The page picks the dot threshold on its own, but if you uncheck the box, you control the threshold with a slider.

"Outline with lines" draws only with the characters / \ | _ -. It suits logos and simple images with sharp edges; photos with smooth gradients get lost in it. The "Line sensitivity" slider controls the level of detail: the higher it is, the more faint lines end up in the drawing.

Why the drawing falls apart after pasting

The drawing keeps its shape only when every character is the same width, that is, when the text is set in a monospaced font. In a regular font a space is narrower than a letter, the rows drift, and the portrait loses its shape.

In Telegram, wrap the text in a code block: three backticks before and after the drawing give you a monospaced font. In Word and other editors, select the pasted text and set it to Consolas or Courier New.

A Braille-dot drawing usually keeps its shape without a code block: all Braille characters take up the same width in one font, and an empty cell is a character too (U+2800), so the chat does not collapse it as extra spaces.