ASCII art

ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII. The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

    _    ____   ____ ___ ___              _ 
   /_\  / ___| / ___|_ _|_ _|   __ _ _ __| |_
  //_\\ \___ \| |    | | | |   / _` | '__| __|
 / ___ \ ___) | |___ | | | |  | (_| | |  | |_
/_/   \_\____/ \____|___|___|  \__,_|_|   \__|

One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners to make the division between print jobs easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk.


Examples of ASCII art


The simplest form of ASCII art are emoticons or smileys

:-) or :)   :-( or :(   ;-) or ;)   :-P or :p    >:(    :x
smile       frown       wink      tongue out   mad   sour
                     
B-) or 8-)  :-O or :O   :-0 or :0   :-S or :S    :D     :?
sunglasses   shouting   surprised    confused   laugh   eh?

ASCII Macarena


More complex examples of ASCII art

            (__)             
            (oo)             
     /-------\/     __          _            ,__o
    / |     ||     /o)\       >(o)__       _-\_<, 
   *  ||----||     \(o/        (_~_/      (*)/'(*)
      ~~    ~~                 ~~~~~~~
        Bull      Yin/Yang   Rubber Duck    Cyclist

      ,-._,-.      ___       (\ /)      
      \/)"(\/     {o,o}      (o.O)
       (_o_)      |)__)      |> <|
                  -"-"-      /_|_\*
    
        Dog        Owl       Cat

Here you can see some awesome ASCII art "pictures" (click on the picture to zoom)

Here you can find a program for generating ASCII art from pictures ASCII generator