ASCII Art Generator – Text to FIGlet Banner

The banners are drawn by FIGlet, the program written in 1991 by Glenn Chappell and Ian Chai that turns text into large letters made of ordinary characters. A FIGlet font (a .flf file) stores every letter as a small grid of characters; the generator places the grids side by side. 26 fonts are included, from the classic Standard, Slant and Big to Doom, Star Wars, Larry 3D and ANSI Shadow. Each line of the input is drawn as its own banner.

The layout decides how close the letters are. Full width keeps every letter at the width its designer gave it. Fitted (kerning) moves letters together until they touch. Smushing goes one step further and lets neighbouring letters share a column: controlled smushing follows the rules stored in the font, for example two identical characters become one and / next to \ becomes |, while universal smushing simply lets the later letter cover the earlier one. Font default uses the layout the font asks for. Max width breaks a banner that is wider than the given number of columns, between words where possible; 0 removes the limit.

FIGlet fonts cover the printable ASCII characters, and many add the accented letters of Latin-1; a character that the font does not have is skipped and listed under the result. Most fonts use only ASCII, but ANSI Shadow, ANSI Regular, Calvin S and Bloody draw with Unicode block and box-drawing characters, so the file that receives them has to be saved as UTF-8. The art only lines up in a monospaced font. The fonts are part of the page: nothing is sent to a server.