Braille Art Generator

Braille art uses the 256 Unicode Braille Patterns (U+2800–U+28FF) as tiny 2 × 4 dot grids, so a picture can be drawn with text and pasted into Discord, Twitch, YouTube comments, forums or a bio. This generator shrinks your picture to the width you choose in characters, decides which dots are dark — automatically or with your own threshold — and builds the text, ready to copy. It works on your device; the picture is not uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose a picture; simple shapes and high-contrast images work best.
2. Set the width in characters to fit where you will paste it.
3. Leave the threshold on automatic or set it by hand; add dithering for shaded photos.
4. Tick invert for dark-mode chats, then copy the text or download it as a file.

Formula

character = U+2800 + the sum of the bits of its raised dots (left column 0x01, 0x02, 0x04, 0x40; right column 0x08, 0x10, 0x20, 0x80, top to bottom)

The picture is scaled to 2 × width dots across and averaged in blocks; rows are padded to a multiple of 4. A dot is raised where the brightness (Rec. 709 luma) is below the threshold. The automatic threshold uses Otsu's method, which picks the value that best separates dark and light pixels. Dithering spreads the rounding error so mid-tones become dot patterns.

Example

A cell whose top and bottom rows are dark and middle rows light has dots 1, 4, 7 and 8 raised: 0x01 + 0x08 + 0x40 + 0x80 = 0xC9, so the character is U+28C9 ⣉. A fully dark cell is U+28FF ⣿, and an empty one U+2800.