Transform your text into beautiful ASCII art

ASCII-Art is a command-line tool that converts regular text into stylized ASCII art using predefined banner templates. Perfect for creating eye-catching headers, banners, or just having fun with text!

🌐 Try the Live Demo

• 🎨 ASCII art using standard banner style (with shadow and thinkertoy support planned)
• 🌈 Color support - colorize entire output or specific substrings with ANSI colors
• 📝 Support for letters, numbers, spaces, and special characters
• 🔄 Multi-line output with \n support
• 📱 Automatic terminal width detection and wrapping - adapts to any screen size
• ⚡ Fast and lightweight - uses only Go standard library
• 🎯 Simple command-line interface

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/g-laliotis/ascii-art.git
cd ascii-art

# Run directly
go run ./cmd/ascii-art "Hello World"

# Or use Makefile
make run

$ go run ./cmd/ascii-art "Hello"
$
 _    _          _   _          $
| |  | |        | | | |         $
| |__| |   ___  | | | |   ___   $
|  __  |  / _ \ | | | |  / _ \  $
| |  | | |  __/ | | | | | (_) | $
|_|  |_|  \___| |_| |_|  \___/  $
                                $

• Go 1.19 or higher

# Build executable
make build

# Run tests
make test

# Install to GOPATH/bin
make install

# See all available commands
make help

# Build executable
go build -o ascii-art ./cmd/ascii-art

# Run all tests
go test -v ./...

# Basic text
go run ./cmd/ascii-art "Hello"

# Multi-line text
go run ./cmd/ascii-art "Hello\nWorld"

# Special characters and numbers
go run ./cmd/ascii-art "Hello There! 123"

# Color entire output
go run ./cmd/ascii-art --color=red "Hello"

# Color specific substring
go run ./cmd/ascii-art --color=blue kit "a king kitten have kit"

# Available colors: red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, orange

# Empty string (prints nothing)
go run ./cmd/ascii-art ""

# Long text (automatically wraps to terminal width)
go run ./cmd/ascii-art "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

The program automatically detects your terminal width and wraps long text accordingly:

• Smart wrapping: Automatically breaks long text at character boundaries
• Any terminal size: Works on narrow mobile terminals to wide desktop screens
• Preserves formatting: Each wrapped section maintains proper ASCII art structure
• Fallback support: Uses COLUMNS environment variable or defaults to 80 characters

ascii-art/
├── cmd/ascii-art/main.go      # Entry point
├── internal/
│   ├── ascii/                 # Core ASCII generation logic
│   │   ├── art.go            # ASCII art generation functions
│   │   ├── banner.go         # Banner file loading and parsing
│   │   ├── color.go          # Color support with ANSI codes
│   │   ├── art_test.go       # Unit tests for art generation
│   │   ├── banner_test.go    # Unit tests for banner loading
│   │   └── color_test.go     # Unit tests for color functionality
│   └── version/
│       └── version.go        # Version information
├── assets/
│   └── standard.txt          # Standard banner template (8 lines per character)
├── docs/
│   └── index.html           # GitHub Pages website with live demo
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       └── ci.yml           # GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline
├── main_test.go             # Integration tests using exec.Command
├── edge_cases_test.go       # Comprehensive edge case tests
├── go.mod                   # Go module definition
├── Makefile                 # Build automation (build, test, install)
├── README.md                # Project documentation
├── CHANGELOG.md             # Version history and changes
├── CONTRIBUTING.md          # Contribution guidelines
└── LICENSE                  # MIT License

1. Input: Takes a string as command-line argument
2. Terminal Detection: Automatically detects terminal width using system calls
3. Processing: Maps each character to its 8-line ASCII representation
4. Smart Wrapping: Calculates character widths and wraps when exceeding terminal width
5. Output: Combines characters horizontally with automatic line breaks
6. Format: Each character is exactly 8 lines tall
7. Support: ASCII characters 32-126 (printable characters)
8. Adaptive Width: Characters have variable widths, automatically handled

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

This project follows Go best practices:

• Standard Go formatting (go fmt)
• Comprehensive unit tests (100% coverage)
• Clean, readable code structure
• Proper error handling
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions

• Giorgos Laliotis
• Stavros Gkraikas

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

See CHANGELOG.md for a detailed history of changes, new features, and bug fixes.

• 🌐 Live Demo & Documentation
• 📋 Changelog
• 📚 Contributing Guidelines
• 🐛 Report Issues
• 💡 Feature Requests

This project is part of the Zone01 curriculum and is now open-source for the community.