What are some good ASCII art generators?

Question

I have tried figlet but it's not much good. Are there any other ASCII editors?

Answer 1

jp2a

Another good program available in the repositories is jp2a, and there is some good documentation on it at the official site and on the Ubuntu manpage.

It should be said that the program will convert any jpg, but it is best to use simple, logo or cartoon like pictures as they come out much better. If you need to convert your image to jpg beforehand, just use imagemagick's convert utility and run convert logo.png logo.jpg.

There is often a need to fiddle with the jp2a options to specify the characters used, the size of the ascii, or to invert the representation. Once you get the settings right you can get good results, however, as I display in the screenshot below. The results do, however, depend a lot on the image you have chosen to convert to ascii.

As an example, I have used the following command to do an ascii representation of the Ubuntu logo, which displays on the terminal screen and also saves to file: (This assumes the input ubuntu-logo.jpg is in your present working directory)

jp2a -i --chars="..00xx@@" ubuntu-logo.jpg | tee ubuntu-logo.txt

Answer 2

TOIlet

I've seen TOIlet, I think that is what you're looking for.

Answer 3

If you want a talking cow there is cowsay :

$ cowsay hello!
 ________
< hello! >
 --------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Answer 4

There are also many cool online converters. Some of them convert text, and some can process ever images! Look at http://www.text-image.com/convert/ or http://ajaxwidgets.com/Ascii-Art/AsciiArt.aspx

Amongst those that deal with text is http://patorjk.com/software/taag/

Answer 5

Taking a step further, if you like to learn a new command with ascii art generated cartoon character like shown below.

You can use cowsay utility and put a simple one line to learn new command.

installing cowsay

sudo apt-get install cowsay

add below line to your .bashrc or .zshrc file located at ~/ i.e ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc to get an ascii art character

cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1) $(whatis $(ls /bin) 2>/dev/null | shuf -n 1)

Cheers

Answer 6

There is a Java Application JaVE that does what you are looking for.

Another, CLI based project would be AA-lib.

Answer 7

I love Linux-logo ( http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/linux_logo/ ). Try adding it to the start of any terminal. Try finding the right logo for Ubuntu (-L)...

---

Have fun!

Answer 8

I use asciio with my python scripts. How to install:

apt-get install asciio

Answer 9

I have a 5 year old son who loves asciiquarium. Asciiquarium is a single perl script, so all you have to do is make sure it's executable and put it somewhere convenient, like /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/games.

Additional requirements for Ubuntu

1. Get perl's curses package which is available from apt.

   sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl
   

2. Run cpan from the shell. Agree to the defaults for everything. To leave cpan, type quit

3. Type:

   sudo cpan Term::Animation
   

Answer 10

Here is a good ascii art generator: http://asciiart.club

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                    ╙║║║║║║║║║║║║║░ └▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓┘    
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It can generate in full color from a variety of character sets, from oldskool/amiga to ascii or extended (even braille!), and generates output in HTML, BBCode, Markdown, and even share an image on Imgur with one click.

Try it! -=cP