ASCII art to copy and paste

ASCII is a character set first published as an American standard in 1963. Its 95 printable characters are the 26 letters in upper and lower case, the digits 0 to 9, the space and 32 punctuation marks and symbols, which is exactly what a US keyboard types without any shortcuts. Art drawn only from those displays on practically any device, which is why it filled early email, message boards and program printouts.

Much of what gets called ASCII art today isn’t. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and portraits made of Braille dots use Unicode characters outside the set, so they are text art rather than ASCII art. Everything on this page keeps to the original 95.

• Proportional fonts. ASCII art assumes every character is the same width, as on a typewriter. Instagram and Facebook set text in fonts where i is narrow and W is wide, so the columns drift.
• Squashed spaces. Art that uses runs of spaces to place things loses them when the app collapses spaces into one, and lines that begin with spaces can lose their indent.
• Wrapping. A phone fits far fewer characters on a line than a computer screen, so a wide piece wraps and splits in two.
• Removed lines. Empty lines inside a piece may be trimmed out, closing gaps the picture depends on.

The pieces above work because each line is short, roughly as wide as its neighbours and light on spaces. The ones to watch are those that start a line with a space, such as the cat, the duck and the stick figures: an app that trims each line will nudge them out of shape, so check them in a draft before you post.

• Post it as a picture. Type the art in a fixed-width font such as Courier, take a screenshot and post the image, with alt text that says what it shows.
• Use a code block where the app has one. Discord and Slack show text between three backticks (```) in a fixed-width font, so the columns stay lined up.
• Switch to Braille art. Braille-pattern characters share one width in most fonts, and the empty pattern isn’t treated as a space, so the picture holds its shape better. It is no longer ASCII, though.

Tip: To a screen reader, ASCII art is a run of punctuation, read one mark at a time or skipped. Say what it is in words next to it, like “a cat for you”, so nobody is left guessing.

Converters that turn photos into ASCII art work by brightness. They split the picture into a grid and swap each cell for a character with about the right amount of ink. A common ten-step scale runs from dark to light as @ % # * + = - : . and finally a space.

For big lettering, FIGlet, a free program first released in 1991, spells out words in banner letters several lines tall, each built from ordinary characters. Drawing by hand goes best in a fixed-width editor. If the piece is meant for a phone, keep it narrow and only a few lines tall, then test it where you plan to post.

Tip: Typing art on an iPhone rather than pasting it? Smart Punctuation turns straight quotes into curly ones and a double hyphen into a long dash, so the fish ><(((('> and the rose @}->-- stop being ASCII. Turn it off under Settings, General, Keyboard while you type.