ASCII art is a
graphic design technique that uses
computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128)
characters defined by the
ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard
7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any
text editor, and is often used with
free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII
art require a
fixed-width font (non-proportional
fonts, as on a traditional
typewriter) such as
Courier for presentation.