What are some good ASCII art generators?

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

Solution 1:

jp2a Install 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

enter image description here

Solution 2:

TOIlet Install TOIlet

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

Solution 3:

If you want a talking cow there is cowsay Install cowsay :

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

Solution 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/

Solution 5:

Taking a step further, if you like to learn a new command with ascii art generated cartoon character like shown below. demo1 demo2

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