about
ascii.art is the permanent home of text art. Correct rendering for both monospaced ASCII and Japanese proportional-font AA is the core of the project.
why text art breaks everywhere else
Most sites strip trailing whitespace, normalize Unicode, or render text in fonts with ligatures that turn -> into arrows. Any of those quietly destroys text art. ascii.art stores the exact bytes you paste and renders them with the exact fonts the art was drawn for.
what is Shift_JIS art?
Shift_JIS art (Japanese ASCII art, or AA) is text art from Japanese bulletin boards like 2channel, drawn against the proportional metrics of MS PGothic at 16px. It looks broken in monospaced fonts — which is why most of it is unreadable on the modern web. ascii.art renders it with Saitamaar, an open-licensed font that is metric-compatible with MS PGothic, so mona, giko and every other classic renders the way it was drawn.
the converter
The converter turns images into text art entirely in your browser: classic tone-based ASCII for photos, and line-trace Shift_JIS art for illustrations (line extraction by a neural network, glyph matching by dynamic programming). Nothing is uploaded until you publish.
Publishing is anonymous and requires no account. Each new artwork receives an editToken, stored by your browser, that authorizes later edits or removal.