ASCII Automata
ASCII AUTOMATA is a tool to analyze the visual connectivity of characters in textmode fonts. It works by scoring edge connectivity of each piece and finding the best matching neighbour piece. Every time it places a piece, it "grows" towards the edges it touches by placing a matching piece. The red heatmap shows how frequently each character is used, useful for analyzing the fonts. I initially made it as a tool for myself. When I design textmode art fonts it is sometimes difficult to figure out if a specific character would actually be useful for drawing or not. I wanted a tool which would…
In plain words
ASCII Automata analyzes how well characters in textmode fonts connect visually to each other. The tool scores edge connectivity and automatically grows patterns by placing matching pieces next to each other, creating emergent designs. A red heatmap displays which characters are used most frequently, helping font designers determine if specific characters are practical for drawing. Originally built as a personal tool, it reveals both font versatility and produces unexpectedly beautiful patterns.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
ASCII AUTOMATA is a tool to analyze the visual connectivity of characters in textmode fonts. It works by scoring edge connectivity of each piece and finding the best matching neighbour piece. Every time it places a piece, it "grows" towards the edges it touches by placing a matching piece. The red heatmap shows how frequently each character is used, useful for analyzing the fonts. I initially made it as a tool for myself. When I design textmode art fonts it is sometimes difficult to figure out if a specific character would actually be useful for drawing or not. I wanted a tool which would show how useful and versatile some character is, and how well it connects to all other pieces. But, as it turned out, this tool produces unexpectedly beautiful emergent patterns, so I made it into a proper little toy-tool for anyone to play around with. Sidenote: it was also a good opportunity to test a new method for constructing a responsive semi-complex UI. I made a web component which renders text as SVG paths using hershey vector fonts. The SVG fills the parent element, and applies stroke after the stretching happens: so strings "a" and "aaa" take the same amount of space, while remaining legible because the stroke is independent of the text's transformations. Thus, I never have problems with overflowing text in the UI! The layout is made with a CSS grid. For example the sidebar is simply <div style="--cols:8;--rows:41;" class="sidebar grid"> and then each UI element gets a position and size <vec-text style="--x:1;--y:19;--w:2;--h:1;">Cell Width</vec-text> . As a result, the layout is easy to make, the sidebar itself can be any size or shape,all the UI elements stay exactly where I put them, and all text remains legible due to the stretchy, monolined vector font web component. It's great! The WHOLE UI layout is just 120 lines of HTML, and 40 lines of CSS (for around 90 UI elements)! (it did take a while to fiddle with the coordinate numbers, but I'm working on a wysiwyg tool to make that easier too...) [crossposted this comment from mastodon: https://typo.social/@gdc/115405978249292146]
More life & fun this month
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Launched alongside, October 2025
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