Creating pictures from monospaced ASCII characters may be useless, but it sure is fun! If you’ve got some time to spare and can download some free software, you can automatically create ASCII art and other wordy graphics in no time.
You’ve probably seen them in text based FAQs or monospaced email signatures—maybe you’ve wondered how people make them. You can always make them by hand, but it’s the true geek’s path to let the computer do the work for you. Read on to check out how to do it.
What is ASCII, and Why Do These Pictures Look So Weird?
ASCII stands for
American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it usually refers to a set of standard monospaced characters when you refer to it in this context. Back when computer graphics were much cruder than they are now, clever users would create art and silly graphics from these standard monospaced characters.
Nowadays, there are programs that can translate pictures and video into ASCII style pictures, similar to the How-To where
we learned to watch Futurama in our Linux terminal. In this how to, we’ll download and install a program to create ASCII style art, and test it out
