GlyphSteep is a drawing app where the paint is characters. Pick a symbol, pick a tool, and fill a grid with it - the way people have been making pictures out of text since long before emoji existed. Drop in a photo and it will trace itself into ASCII for you, then you go back over it by hand until it looks right.
No account, no upload, no internet. Your art is a plain text file the whole time, so it pastes straight into a chat, a README, a forum post or a terminal banner, and any text editor on earth can open it.
What you can do
- Draw with real tools - pencil, eraser, paint bucket, eyedropper and a rectangular selection, all working on a character grid instead of pixels.
- Turn a photo into text - load any image and convert it to ASCII, or to Braille dots for four times the detail. You choose the symbols it uses, darkest to lightest, so you stay in control of the result.
- Trace over a picture - drop an image behind the canvas as a faint guide and redraw it yourself, with contrast and brightness sliders to bring out the shapes.
- Build your own palette - pull any range of Unicode into a symbol table and keep the ones you like. Box drawing, kana, maths, dingbats, blocks and shades are all fair game.
- Bring your own font - load a .ttf, .otf or .woff and draw with its glyphs, which is how you get the wide-character look right for Shift_JIS art.
- Save it either way - keep it as a .txt you can paste anywhere, or export a .png at whatever size you need for somewhere that will not take plain text.
- Work light or dark - flip the whole canvas with one button to check how your art reads on a dark background before you post it.
How it works
Open GlyphSteep and you get an empty grid. Choose a character from the palette on the right, choose the pencil, and start clicking. Resize the canvas whenever you like, select a region to cut, copy, crop or move it, and step backwards through your changes with undo.
Double-click a .txt or .asc file and it opens straight in GlyphSteep, ready to edit. When you are done, save it back out as text or export it as an image - both go through the normal Save dialog, to anywhere on your machine.
Perfect for
- Anyone who wants a signature, banner or logo made of characters
- Developers decorating a README, a CLI splash screen or a commit message
- Fans of Shift_JIS art, kaomoji and the old BBS and demoscene text styles
- Game makers roughing out roguelike maps, tilesets and UI mockups
- Anyone who just likes making pictures out of typography
