Text Art
Borders, dividers, blocks and box-drawing characters.
About text art characters
Box-drawing characters, block elements, shading, braille dots and geometric shapes β the building blocks for terminal-style borders, dividers and simple diagrams. Alongside the raw characters there are ready-made frames and separators you can drop straight into a README, a commit message, a config comment or a chat.
Everything here is plain Unicode text. It survives copy-paste, works in a monospaced code block, and needs no image hosting.
Getting borders to line up
Box-drawing art only aligns if every character occupies the same width, so use a
monospaced font β the code block in a README, a terminal, or a <pre>
element on a web page. In a proportional font such as Arial, the corner and line pieces
are different widths and the frame will look ragged.
Mixing weights is the other common trap: the light (ββββ), heavy (ββββ) and double (ββββ) sets are separate families. Joining a light line to a heavy corner leaves a visible step, so pick one family and stay in it.
Frequently asked questions
What are box-drawing characters?
They are Unicode characters designed to draw boxes and lines in text β corners, edges, junctions and crossings. They come from early terminal and DOS character sets and are still the standard way to draw frames in a command-line interface.
Why doesn't my text border line up?
Almost always because the text is displayed in a proportional font. Box-drawing characters only align in a monospaced font, where every character has identical width. Put the art in a code block or a pre element.
Can I use text art in a GitHub README?
Yes. Put it inside a fenced code block so GitHub renders it in a monospaced font. Outside a code block the proportional font will misalign the characters.
What is the difference between β β and β?
They are shade blocks at increasing density β light, medium and dark. Combined with the full block β they give four levels of shading, which is how text-mode interfaces faked gradients and progress bars.