Markdown ASCII art template: draw an invented lantern

One object made of keyboard characters

An ASCII art template gives one small text drawing a place in a Markdown file. Here, a cap, a rounded body and a foot make an invented lantern. The picture consists of ordinary keyboard letters and punctuation, with spaces filling the gaps.

A plain sentence beneath the title placeholder names what the drawing shows. Keep the object small enough that its boundary, inside and base are distinct without labels written across it. This template stays with that single object.

Save the text using .md as the filename ending; the .md file explained describes that choice.

Lantern drawing template

The fictional Doe project needs a lantern drawing, which its invented writer Jane Doe makes by hand. The lantern below is invented for this example. Substitute your object's title for the bracketed phrase, then adapt the sentence to describe it.

# [Invented lantern title]

Jane Doe's lantern has a round body, a small flame and a low foot.

    .---.    
   /     \   
  (   o   )  
  (  /|\  )  
   \_____/   
    /___\    

The title and sentence give the picture a subject before its first drawn line. The six lines below the sentence are the drawing itself; the spaces on either side belong to those lines.

Boundary, inside and base

The boundary begins with the cap, made from periods and hyphens. Slashes widen it into the rounded body, and parentheses hold the two middle lines open around the inside. Underscores close the lower body.

Inside that boundary, a lowercase o sits above three short strokes to suggest a fictional flame. Those strokes are a slash, a vertical bar and a backslash. Leave air around them so the inside remains separate from the boundary.

The base is the last line, a low foot made with a slash, underscores and a backslash. It sits beneath the body with spaces on both sides. For a different invented object, redraw these regions while keeping one picture in the fence.

Equal width and a fence

Keep all six drawing lines thirteen characters wide, including the spaces before and after the visible punctuation. Use spaces rather than tabs: a tab can occupy a different amount of room depending on where the text is opened. When you lengthen one line, add spaces to the shorter lines to match its width.

Keep the drawing inside its fence so the spaces and line endings stay as typed. The opening line carries the word text; the closing line ends the fenced passage. For the broader fence conventions, read Markdown code blocks.

A name for the drawing file

Use doe-lantern.md for this invented example. The name pairs the fictional project with the object, using hyphens between words. For other choices of case and separators, see Markdown file naming.

Where Sashmark fits

For desktop reading plus edits to Markdown, Sashmark is being built. Its planned audience keeps Markdown written by agents among their files.