ASCII Box Generator
Put a border around your text. Make a framed note for a README or plain-text document without lining up the edges by hand.
Edit text, width, border or padding and see the result immediately. No Generate step. No account needed.
Live preview
40 columns, 4 rows
+--------------------------------------+ | Release notes | | Build passed | +--------------------------------------+
Keep the monospace font, spaces and line breaks in the destination. Markdown adds a fenced code block; it does not add color or make the text executable. PNG is black text on white, independent of the site theme.
Browse all 12 border samplesMake your own corners and edges
Choose Custom border to edit eight parts: four corners and four repeating edges. Each part supports 1-8 printable ASCII columns and 1-8 equally wide rows. Spaces are kept, including trailing spaces; add them yourself to pad short rows. Blank parts use spaces, not empty fields.
Top corners must match the top edge height, and bottom corners the bottom edge height. Corner widths match the left or right side. Top and bottom patterns repeat across the available width, cropping the final repeat; side patterns repeat down independently. The body height follows your text, wrapping and vertical padding. An optional title replaces part of the first top row.
Open an original border sample for a ready-to-edit frame. Your custom parts stay in the draft when you switch to a standard style. Invalid edits disable all exports until corrected, and samples ask before replacing unexported work.
Width means the whole box
With the default one-space side padding, a 40-column box has 36 columns for text: the other four are two border characters and one padding space on each side. By default, long lines split at the available width, not at word boundaries; choose Whole words under Long lines to keep words whole. Every output row has the same length, including empty rows.
Existing spaces and blank lines remain, including a final blank line. Windows CRLF line breaks become LF. In your text, tabs, emoji, accented letters and Unicode box-drawing characters are rejected, not removed or transliterated. Leave the text empty if you only need an empty frame.
Classic, Equals, Stars, Hash and Dotted borders are plain ASCII. Unicode single, double, rounded and heavy borders look cleaner in terminals and code blocks but need a font with box-drawing characters; pick an ASCII border when the text may reach an older system or plain email.
Use it where spaces stay put
For a README, choose Copy as Markdown and preview the fenced block. For a text file, choose Download TXT and open it in a monospace editor with wrapping off. A proportional font or a chat that collapses spaces can break the border. Download PNG preserves the rendered frame as black text on white, independent of the site theme.
The box is plain text, not a programming-language comment. Add the correct comment markers yourself and check any comment-ending sequences before putting it in source code. For a single labeled section line, use the ASCII divider generator. To connect several steps with arrows and an optional yes/no decision, use the ASCII flowchart generator. For large letter banners instead, use the FIGlet text generator.
Input is limited to 4,096 UTF-16 units and output to 200,000 characters. Formatting runs in your browser; typed text and custom border parts are not put in links or analytics, or saved by this tool. Site analytics, storage and hosting are separate. See the developer examples for README and terminal formatting.