What are some good ASCII art generators?

jp2a

Another good program available in the repositories is jp2a, and there is some good documentation on it at the official site and on the Ubuntu manpage.

It should be said that the program will convert any jpg, but it is best to use simple, logo or cartoon like pictures as they come out much better. If you need to convert your image to jpg beforehand, just use imagemagick's convert utility and run convert logo.png logo.jpg.

There is often a need to fiddle with the jp2a options to specify the characters used, the size of the ascii, or to invert the representation. Once you get the settings right you can get good results, however, as I display in the screenshot below. The results do, however, depend a lot on the image you have chosen to convert to ascii.

As an example, I have used the following command to do an ascii representation of the Ubuntu logo, which displays on the terminal screen and also saves to file: (This assumes the input ubuntu-logo.jpg is in your present working directory)

jp2a -i --chars="..00xx@@" ubuntu-logo.jpg | tee ubuntu-logo.txt

TOIlet

I've seen TOIlet, I think that is what you're looking for.

If you want a talking cow there is cowsay :

$ cowsay hello!
 ________
< hello! >
 --------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||