I found this at Grmmxi. A site from Heikki Lotvonen, a coder and designer specializing in modular design and text art. Then I found the Glyph Drawing Club which has a blog site to post about text art and a guide to using the GDC.
software
Make Your Own Font
I found FontForge which is a free and open source font editor. You can use it to make your own fonts. My favourite font for ASCII art is FixedSys, the one which comes with MS Notepad. It is thick/ bold so easy to view as I’m making something new or for capturing screenshots to share what I finish making.
I’m not quite ready to try making my own monospaced font. But, it would be an interesting project.