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How to Make Korean (Hangul) ASCII Art

FIGlet fonts have no Hangul. Pick the right length and style and even a name comes out clean.

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Type Korean into an ASCII banner generator and you usually get an empty result or a row of question marks. The generator is not broken. The fonts it uses simply have no Korean characters. This guide explains how to make Hangul text art anyway, and how to make it look good.

Why most generators skip Korean

English banners are made with FIGlet fonts. A FIGlet font stores a multi-line drawing for every letter from A to Z, and the generator places those drawings side by side. Letters, digits, and punctuation add up to fewer than a hundred characters, so drawing them all by hand is easy.

Hangul is different. Each syllable block combines an initial consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant, and modern Korean has 11,172 possible syllables. FIGlet fonts that cover them are hard to find, so English generators leave Hangul out.

The Korean ASCII art tool takes another approach. It draws your text off screen in a bold Korean font, splits the drawing into small cells, and measures how much of each cell is filled. Filled cells get a dense character and empty cells get a space, so the shape of each syllable appears in plain text. Syllables with final consonants, including double ones, keep their shape.

Three steps

  1. Type a Korean name or phrase on the Korean ASCII art page. The art is drawn as you type.
  2. Compare the six styles in the cards below the result and click the one you like. Clicking a card copies it.
  3. Use Copy, TXT, or PNG in the result box, depending on where it is going.

If you type Hangul into the text banner on the home page, it switches to Hangul mode automatically.

Six styles and when to use them

A style is the set of characters that fills the cells. The same word can look very different, and some styles survive copy and paste better than others.

Style Characters Good for
Block █ The sharpest shape. PNG images and monospaced places
Shade ░ ▒ ▓ █ Softer edges. PNG images and terminals
Hash # Keyboard characters only. Displays well almost anywhere
Classic . : - = + * # % @ The traditional ASCII art look
Dot · • ● Rounded and light. Short words
At @ Like Hash, but darker

Here is “사랑해” (“I love you”) in the Block style.

  ██   ███  ██████  ██    ███  █████
  ██   ███  ██████  ██████████ █████
  ███  ████ ███████ ██   █████ █████
██████ ███     ████ ██  ██  ██ █████
██   █████    ████████   ████  █████
       ███    ████████         █████

The Hash style uses only the keyboard character #, so it keeps its shape in places that cannot show block characters. This is “화이팅” (“You can do it”).

 ####### ##    ###   ###  ######  ##
  ####   ##  ### ### ###  ######  ##
 ##  ##  ### ##   ## ###  ####### ##
  #####  ##  ###  ## ###     #### ##
######## ##    ####  ###    ########
         ##          ###    ########

The Classic style uses several characters for different shades, so the edges of each stroke look smoother. This is “고마워” (“Thank you”).

                     ::           .:.
 =%%%%%%%%%  +*****- @@.  -%@%@#: #@=
  .......@@  %@=:*@+ @@.  @@:.=@* #@=
    =*- .@@  %@: +@+ @@%# .+###+:.#@=
    *@= =@#  %@=:*@+ @@. *%%@@%#*=#@=
-===%@#===== +*****- @@.    #@-:##@@=
-+++++++++++         @@.    #@-   #@=
                     ::           .:.

How many syllables fit?

One Korean syllable takes about 12 to 16 columns. The three syllables of “사랑해” above take 36 columns. Hangul art gets wide much faster than an English banner, so choose the length based on where you will paste it.

Destination Suggested length
Chat apps 2 to 3 syllables
Discord code block 3 to 4 syllables
GitHub README or terminal About 5 syllables
PNG image Any length, but long text looks small

For a long phrase, make two pieces and stack them, or turn only the name into art and write the rest as normal text.

When it breaks in a chat app

Most chat apps use proportional fonts, where spaces and symbols have different widths. Art that is perfectly aligned on a desktop drifts apart in a message bubble.

  • Use a code block where the app supports one, such as ``` on Discord, Slack, Telegram, or WhatsApp.
  • Keyboard-only styles (Hash, Classic, At) usually survive better than block characters.
  • To keep the exact shape, save a PNG and send it as an image.

The chat app guide covers the differences between apps in more detail.

Mixing in English and numbers

You can mix digits and Latin letters with Korean, as in “2026 화이팅”, and they are drawn the same way. For English-only text, the text banner on the home page gives cleaner results: its 12 FIGlet fonts were drawn letter by letter, so strokes are straighter and lines are narrower. You can compare them on the FIGlet font list.

All drawing happens in your browser and your text is never sent to a server. When you press Share, the text is stored after the # in the shared link.

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