What is text art?
Text art is a picture drawn with characters instead of lines. The oldest kind uses only what's on a keyboard: the owl on this page is commas, brackets, dashes and quote marks. Newer text art borrows from the thousands of symbols in Unicode, like braille dots, box lines and stars, which is why it can hold far more detail than anything you could type by hand.
People also call these text pictures or text images. Whatever the name, the useful part is the same: it's text, so it pastes anywhere text goes, loads instantly, and doesn't need an image upload.
How do braille text pictures work?
Each braille character is a cell of up to eight dots, two across and four down, and Unicode includes all 256 patterns, from U+2800 to U+28FF. Choose the right cell for each patch of a picture and the dots join into a shape, the way a newspaper photo is made of tiny dots.
The braille pictures here were drawn as pixel grids and turned into braille cells, eight pixels to a character, so every dot is placed on purpose. They are the same drawings as our emoji art, in one colour and a good deal smaller in a message. The braille heart is 12 characters wide and 6 lines tall.
Why does text art look crooked after I paste it?
Usually the font. Chat apps show text in a proportional font, where a space or an i takes far less room than an m. Keyboard art that lines things up with spaces, like the sitting cat, shifts when those spaces shrink.
Braille pictures hold their shape better, because the empty parts use the blank braille cell, U+2800, instead of a space. It is the same width as the other braille cells, so the rows stay in line.
- In Discord and WhatsApp, put three backticks (```) on the line before the art and the line after. Both apps then show it in a fixed-width font, where every character takes the same space.
- If a row wraps, the piece is wider than the chat bubble. Braille pictures here are at most 15 characters wide; pick a narrower one or turn the phone sideways.
- If it starts partway along, it was pasted after other text on the same line. Start it on a new line.
Is text art the same as ASCII art?
ASCII art is the oldest kind of text art, and its name is exact: it uses only the 95 printable ASCII characters, the ones on an English keyboard. The owl, the sitting cat and the sleeping bunny here are pure ASCII. Braille dots, stars and emoji are Unicode, so those pieces are text art but, strictly, not ASCII art. In everyday use people treat the two names as one.
Can you send text art in an SMS?
Yes, and the keyboard classics are the cheapest thing on this page to send. The owl, the sitting cat and the sleeping bunny use only characters from the standard SMS alphabet, so each fits in one ordinary text. A braille dot, a star or an emoji switches the message to Unicode, where one text holds 70 characters. The braille heart is 77 characters with its line breaks, so it goes as 2 texts. Each piece shows its count underneath.
Can screen readers read text art?
Not as a picture. A screen reader reads each character aloud, so a braille heart becomes a long run of dot patterns and keyboard art becomes a list of brackets. On this page every piece has a label, so a screen reader says "Heart" instead. When you post text art in public, a word before it, like "heart" or "happy birthday", does the same job for anyone listening.
What are text dividers for?
Dividers split a bio, a caption or a long message into parts without a picture taking over. They are a single line, so they can't wrap into a mess, and the ones here run from 9 to 29 characters. The short ones fit neatly between the lines of an Instagram or Discord bio.