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Fancy text converters, ASCII art makers, typography experiments and the specific pleasure of putting words through something that mangles them.
14 sites
Decades of ASCII drawings sorted by subject, from cats to warships, every one of them ready to copy and paste.
Draws boxes, arrows and flowcharts entirely out of monospace characters, for diagrams that live inside code comments.
Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.
Home of the format that turns text into large letters made of smaller letters, with the whole font archive attached.
Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.
Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.
The canonical placeholder text, plus the Cicero passage it was cut from and an explanation of what it says.
Generate a fake newspaper clipping, a talking animation or a ransom note. The 2005 internet, rebuilt so it still works.
Type a word, pick from several hundred FIGlet fonts, and get the enormous ASCII banner your terminal deserves.
Converts an uploaded photograph into ASCII, HTML or coloured text art, with the character density under your control.
Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.
Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.
Unicode styling for places that forbid formatting, so bold and italic survive a paste into a profile bio.
Piles combining diacritics onto every character until your text bleeds into the lines above and below it.
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 1 of them is an AltF original that run right here.
14 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
9 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 14 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.
One button, one detour. Press it as often as you like.