ASCII Art Generator

Turning text into ASCII art

An ASCII art generator renders your text as large letters built out of smaller characters, the banner style you see in terminal splash screens and README headers. Each letter is drawn from a font definition that describes how to compose it from characters across several rows.

How figlet-style fonts work

The classic approach comes from FIGlet. A FIGfont stores, for every character, a fixed-height block of text, commonly six or eight rows tall. The generator stitches those blocks side by side. Fonts vary wildly: some are blocky and bold, some use slashes and underscores for a 3D look, some are tiny.

Example

 _    _ _
| |  | (_)
| |__| |_
|  __  | |
| |  | | |
|_|  |_|_|   ("Hi")

Every glyph occupies the same height so the rows line up. The art only looks right in a monospace font, where every character is the same width.

Where it works and where it breaks

ASCII banners are great in terminals, code comments, and plain-text files. They fall apart in proportional fonts, since the careful column alignment collapses. They also do not scale: unlike a real font, you cannot resize them smoothly, and very long input quickly overruns a normal terminal width.

FAQ

Why is my banner misaligned when I paste it? It is being shown in a proportional font. Wrap it in a monospace or code block and the columns line up.

Can it render lowercase and symbols? That depends on the font. Many banner fonts define only uppercase and digits, and fall back or blank out unsupported characters.

Why does long text wrap oddly? Each letter is several characters wide, so a short word can exceed the terminal width and wrap mid-glyph.