About

Standard terminal text lacks visual weight. ASCII art banners rendered from UTF-8 block elements (█, ▄, ▀, ░) solve this for README headers, code comments, server MOTD screens, and terminal splash pages. This tool maps each printable ASCII character (codes 32 - 126) to a hand-crafted glyph matrix of fixed height h = 6 rows, then concatenates them horizontally with configurable letter spacing s. Misaligned glyphs or inconsistent row counts produce broken output in monospace environments. The generator enforces strict row parity across all 95 glyphs per font style.

Three font styles are provided: Block (solid █ fills), Shadow (offset depth using ▒ and ░ half-blocks), and Slim (narrow glyphs using │ and ─ line-drawing characters). Output is pure UTF-8 text. No images, no dependencies. It pastes cleanly into any monospace context. Input is capped at 80 characters to prevent line wrapping in standard 80-column terminals. Pro tip: test your output in the target terminal. Font ligatures and non-monospace rendering will break alignment.

Formulas

Each character c in the input string is mapped to a glyph G(c) which is an array of h strings (rows). The output is built by horizontal concatenation:

Output[row] = n∑i=1 G(c_i)[row] + S

Where n is the number of input characters, row ranges from 0 to h − 1, and S is a spacing string of length s (default 1) filled with spaces. Each glyph G(c) has fixed width w (font-dependent, typically 6 - 8 columns) and fixed height h = 6 rows. Total output width equals n × (w + s) columns.

Reference Data

UTF-8 Character	Code Point	Name	Common Use in Art
█	U+2588	Full Block	Solid fill, primary stroke
▄	U+2584	Lower Half Block	Bottom edges, rounded bases
▀	U+2580	Upper Half Block	Top edges, caps
▌	U+258C	Left Half Block	Left vertical edges
▐	U+2590	Right Half Block	Right vertical edges
░	U+2591	Light Shade	Shadow, background texture
▒	U+2592	Medium Shade	Medium shadow, depth
▓	U+2593	Dark Shade	Dense shadow
│	U+2502	Box Light Vertical	Slim font verticals
─	U+2500	Box Light Horizontal	Slim font horizontals
┌	U+250C	Box Light Down Right	Top-left corners
┐	U+2510	Box Light Down Left	Top-right corners
└	U+2514	Box Light Up Right	Bottom-left corners
┘	U+2518	Box Light Up Left	Bottom-right corners
┼	U+253C	Box Light Cross	Intersections
━	U+2501	Box Heavy Horizontal	Bold horizontals
┃	U+2503	Box Heavy Vertical	Bold verticals
╱	U+2571	Box Light Diagonal Upper Right	Forward slash strokes
╲	U+2572	Box Light Diagonal Upper Left	Backslash strokes
·	U+00B7	Middle Dot	Dot separators, spacing

Frequently Asked Questions

The art relies on monospace font rendering where every character occupies exactly the same horizontal width. If your target uses a proportional font (e.g., Arial, Helvetica), the columns will misalign. Paste into contexts that use monospace: terminal emulators, code editors, <pre> HTML tags, Discord code blocks (wrap in triple backticks), or Markdown code fences.

Input is limited to 80 characters. Each glyph is 6-8 columns wide plus spacing, so 80 characters can produce up to 720 columns of output. Standard terminal width is 80 columns. Exceeding this causes line wrapping which destroys the art. For longer text, split across multiple lines and generate separately.

All printable ASCII characters from code point 32 (space) through 126 (~). This includes uppercase A - Z, lowercase a - z, digits 0-9, and standard punctuation. Characters outside this range (emoji, accented letters, CJK) are replaced with a fallback placeholder block to prevent rendering errors.

Block uses full block character U+2588 exclusively for maximum density and readability at small sizes. Shadow adds depth offset using shade characters U+2591 and U+2592 on the right and bottom edges, increasing glyph width by 1-2 columns. Slim uses box-drawing characters (U+2500, U+2502, U+250C, etc.) for minimal stroke width, producing lighter output suitable for decorative headers.

The output is plain UTF-8 text. There is no copyright on character sequences. You can embed it in source code comments, README files, server banners, printed materials, or any other context without restriction. The glyphs use Unicode block elements standardized in Unicode 1.0 (1991) and supported by all modern systems.