ASCII Text Art Generator - FIGlet Banner Maker

How to use this tool

1. Enter up to 40 characters. Short phrases are easier to fit in terminals and READMEs.
2. Choose one of ten real FIGlet fonts, an Auto or fixed output width (40, 80, 120, or 160), and Default, Fitted, or Full horizontal layout.
3. Use Copy for plain art, Copy Markdown for a fenced text block, or Download .txt to save the output with its spacing preserved.

ASCII art history

ASCII art predates computers: typewriter art dates to the 1860s. In computing, it emerged in the 1960s on line printers and teletype machines, flourished on bulletin board systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and continued through email signatures, Usenet, and IRC. Monospace characters made it possible to build pictures and letterforms from text that could travel through simple terminals and documents.

How FIGlet text art works

FIGlet (“Frank, Ian and Glenn’s Letters”) arranges character shapes stored in the FIGfont format. This generator uses figlet.js to render actual .flf font files rather than approximating each letter with a small hand-drawn grid. Standard is the default. The engine combines each glyph into multi-line text and applies the chosen horizontal layout to control the spacing between letters.

The font, output width, and horizontal layout are selectable in the generator above. Auto leaves the font’s natural width unchanged; fixed widths of 40, 80, 120, or 160 columns ask FIGlet to break the input at whitespace when possible and split long unspaced text at character boundaries. A single glyph wider than the selected width cannot be split. The column count reports the widest rendered line, while the preview-size buttons only change how large the output appears on screen.

Popular FIGlet fonts included here

All ten names below are real, selectable FIGfonts in the control panel. Choose a font and enter the same word, such as HELLO, to compare its actual letter shapes. Each font file is loaded from this site when first needed, so choosing a different style changes the rendered output without sending your text to a service.

• Standard (the default), Big, Block, and Slant
• Banner, Doom, Small, and Mini
• Shadow and ANSI Shadow

Uses today

FIGlet banners are useful when a small text heading needs to stand out in a plain-text setting. For example, a developer can make a README section title with Standard, switch to Fitted to reduce spacing, and copy the Markdown text fence to keep alignment on GitHub. A terminal greeting or source-code divider is another common use. Fixed-width wrapping can help keep a multi-word banner near an 80-column terminal. Long unspaced text is split at character boundaries when needed to fit the selected width.

Preserving alignment in documents

Keep the result in a monospace font so every character occupies a consistent column. Use Copy for plain output, Copy Markdown to include a text code fence, or Download .txt to save the art with its spaces and line breaks intact. Some fonts, especially ANSI Shadow, use Unicode block characters, so check that your terminal or document font can display them. Typed text is rendered in your browser and stays on your device; only the selected font file is fetched from a same-origin Toolcroft asset when it is first used.