How to Draw With Text in Notepad

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Last Updated: January 10, 2025

Want to make a drawing out of text and other keyboard characters? We'll show you how to draw a picture entirely from text, including special characters you can create with Alt codes, in the Notepad app for Windows.

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1
Learn the basics. They include the following characters:
- A slash, / or \, is used for drawing a slant line.
- A hyphen, -, is used to make a dashed horizontal line.
- An underscore, _, is used to make a continuous horizontal line.
- A 'shift + \', resulting in |, is used to make a dashed vertical line.
- The brackets, including (), [] or {}, are used to make the end of a rectangle.
- The 'numbers square', #, is used to make a grid.
- The space bar is needed, too!
- You might find some use for any other characters, like the 'greater than' and 'less than' signs, < and >, or the percentage sign, %, etc.
These codes might give you some options, like the playing cards shapes, ♥♦♣♠ (alt + 3, alt + 4, alt + 5 and alt + 6 on the numeric keypad only). This website might be of some help to you: http://alt-codes.org/list/.

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3
Prepare your notepad:
- Open the notepad program; go to format; click on 'Word Wrap' to switch it on.
- Go to format again; click on 'font'; then set the text to 'Lucida Console', regular and 20.
Try to draw a rectangle to see if it works with you or not.

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Question

What keys to push for straight lines going down?

Vatsalya Gupta

Community Answer

Shift+/ then enter and then Shift+/. This will make straight lines going down.

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Tips

There are no colors in here, only greyscale.

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This article shows the basics. Some 'alt codes' can be used for shading the drawing, and so on.

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This article is for having fun only. However, if you are willing to add a read me file in a compressed file, this might be a more friendly way to say thank you.

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