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Text Art & Drawing Characters160 symbols
Lines, corners, junctions, shades and blocks — the bricks of text art. Open any one for its name and the fonts that have it.
Box drawing #box-drawing
Blocks & shades #blocks-shades
About text art & drawing characters
Text art needs exactly two things: pieces that join up, and fills in even steps. The box-drawing block is the joinery — horizontal and vertical rules in single, double and mixed weights, with every corner, tee and cross pre-computed so lines meet without gaps. The block elements are the fills: full blocks, half blocks, and the quarter-step shades (light, medium, dark) that fake a gradient in monochrome.
These characters came from the terminal and videotex era, when a screen was a grid of cells and pictures had to be built from the character set itself. BBS and ANSI artists turned the constraint into a style, and the same pieces still draw diagrams, borders and progress bars anywhere plain text runs.