ASCII Art Text Banner (FIGlet)

Big letters made of ordinary characters have decorated terminals since the 1980s, and they are still everywhere: the start-up screen of a command-line tool, a section divider in a long configuration file, the header of a README. FIGlet is the classic program that draws them, using font files that describe each letter as a block of characters. This generator runs the same fonts in your browser.

How FIGlet fonts work

A FIGlet font defines every printable ASCII character as a small grid of text, several lines tall. When the letters are placed side by side, the font’s smushing rules decide how neighbouring edges overlap, so diagonal strokes and underscores join neatly instead of leaving gaps. The result is a banner several lines high that only lines up in a monospaced font.

Choosing a font

Twenty-two fonts are included, from the compact Small and Mini to the large Colossal and Banner3. Standard is the default FIGlet font and the most widely recognised. Slant gives a sense of motion, Doom and ANSI Shadow suit game and terminal tools, Block and Banner are bold and blocky, and 3-D, Larry 3D and Isometric1 add depth. Switch on “Preview every font” to see your text in all of them side by side and click one to select it.

Width and spacing

Banners can become very wide. Set the wrap width to your terminal or editor width — 80 columns is a safe choice — and long text breaks at spaces onto new banner lines. “Tight letter spacing” uses the fitted layout, which moves letters together until they touch, making banners narrower at the cost of some legibility. The panel title shows how many columns wide the banner is.

Using banners in code and documents

Choose a wrapper and the banner is ready to paste. // comments suit JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust, C, Java and Swift; # comments suit Python, shell scripts, YAML, TOML and Dockerfiles; a /* */ block suits CSS and C-style headers. For a README, wrap it in a Markdown code block so GitHub displays it in a monospaced font. Trailing spaces are trimmed so linters do not complain.

Displaying it correctly

ASCII art depends on every character having the same width. In a terminal, code editor or code block it lines up; in a word processor, a chat message or ordinary web text with a proportional font, the columns drift and the letters fall apart. Many fonts also use backslashes, which need escaping inside normal string literals, so prefer raw strings when embedding a banner in code.

A worked example

The default text “Hello” in Standard produces a five-line banner whose first line is _ _ _ _. Switching to Slant and choosing # comments gives the same word slanted, with every line starting with #, ready for a Python script or a Dockerfile.

Limits

FIGlet fonts cover the ASCII letters, digits and punctuation, and some include accented Latin letters; other scripts and emoji are not drawn.

Related tools

Draw text tables with the ASCII Table Converter, style text with Unicode in the Fancy Text Generator, shrink code with the Code Minifier, or build tables for a README in the Markdown Table Generator.