Pictures made of plain text
Keyboard CrayonsDraw with the characters on your keyboard.
Stamp big letters, a frame, a talking cat or a photo onto the paper, paint on it one character at a time, and copy the lot into a README, a code comment, a chat or a note for the fridge. It stays plain text wherever it goes.
Paint: press and drag. Erase: the same, with spaces. Type: click a spot and type; arrow keys move, Backspace rubs out.
1 Big letters free
2 A creature says free
3 A photo as text free
4 A sketch of anything metered
Name a thing and up to three more; the model draws them in plain characters inside the box. The page decides first what fits - a short box holds fewer things, and words on a sign go to Big letters - and checks the picture against the box afterwards.
Pricing as soon as the session is ready...
Sign inThe reply could not be read as a sketch. Here it is as it came back:
Left out
Key
The page's check
5 Take it with you free
6 Saved sheets
How it works
Everything on the paper is printable ASCII - the 95 characters from space to ~ - so it looks the same in any monospaced place: a terminal, a code editor, a Markdown code block, a plain-text email. Big letters use the page's own five-row block font; the frame, the creatures and the speech bubble are drawn by the page; a photo is turned into text by averaging the brightness under each character, with the densest characters for the darkest parts.
The sketch, decided in this order: a box up to 8 rows tall fits one thing, up to 14 rows two things, taller three; things past that are left out, last named first. Words in quotes are never drawn into the picture - put them on the paper with Big letters. If anything is left out the verdict is simplified to fit, otherwise drawn as asked. The page then checks the reply: rows wider or longer than the box are cut, characters outside plain ASCII become ?, and anything the reply left out that the page did not - or the other way round - is listed.