ASCII Art Text Generator
Big letters made of keyboard characters, in 15 classic FIGlet fonts.
Your banner
Type some text above to see it as a banner.
Preview in every font
The first line of your text (up to 24 characters) in all 15 fonts, each with its own default spacing and no wrapping.
Fonts from the FIGlet 2.2.5 distribution, unchanged, under the BSD-3-Clause licence; each font names its designer in the font list.
About the ASCII Art Text Generator
Type a word or a short line and see it drawn in big letters made of ordinary keyboard characters — the banners you find at the top of README files, in terminal welcome messages, in source-code headers and in e-mail signatures. The generator uses 15 fonts from the FIGlet 2.2.5 distribution (Standard, Big, Slant, Small, Banner, Block, Shadow, Script and more), shipped unchanged under their BSD licence, and lays the letters out the way the figlet program does: same spacing rules, same word wrapping, same alignment.
Pick the font from the list or compare your text in all of them at once, set the width (80 columns, like a classic terminal, or no wrapping at all) and choose how close the letters sit. Then copy the art as plain text, as a Markdown code block for GitHub or GitLab, or as a ready-made comment for JavaScript, Python, SQL, HTML and other languages. Everything runs in your browser.
How to use it
- Type your text in the box. The banner updates as you type; each line of your text becomes its own row of big letters.
- Choose a font, or open Preview in every font to see your text in all 15 and pick one with Use this font.
- Set the width in columns (the art wraps at the last space that fits, like
figlet -w), the spacing (the font’s default, full width, fitted or smushed) and the alignment. - Under Paste as, choose plain text, a Markdown code block or the comment style of your programming language, then press Copy or Download .txt.
Examples
Hi
_ _ _ | | | (_) | |_| | | | _ | | |_| |_|_|
v2.0
# ___ __ # __ _|_ ) / \ # \ V // / | () | # \_//___(_)__/
With Remove blank rows on, the empty rows the font keeps for descenders are dropped, so the comment is only as tall as the letters.
Docs
```text
____
/ __ \____ __________
/ / / / __ \/ ___/ ___/
/ /_/ / /_/ / /__(__ )
/_____/\____/\___/____/
```GitHub and GitLab show a fenced code block in a monospaced font, so the letters line up. The fence is made longer automatically if the art itself contains backticks.
Hi (Standard)
Full width: _ _ _ | | | | (_) | |_| | | | | _ | | | |_| |_| |_| Fitted: _ _ _ | | | |(_) | |_| || | | _ || | |_| |_||_| Smushed (the font’s default): _ _ _ | | | (_) | |_| | | | _ | | |_| |_|_|
Smushing merges the touching edges: here the right side of H and the left side of i share one column of |.
Common uses
- A banner at the top of a GitHub or GitLab README.
- A header comment that names a project or a section in a source file or config file.
- A welcome message for a terminal, a server login (MOTD) or a command-line tool.
- Big headings in plain-text e-mails, chat code blocks and text files.
How the letters are put together
A FIGlet font stores every character as a small block of rows (six rows in Standard, eight in Big and Banner, three in Digital). The generator places the blocks side by side in one of three ways, as described in the FIGfont Version 2 standard that comes with FIGlet:
- Full width: each letter keeps its whole block, spaces included.
- Fitted (kerning): letters move together until they touch.
- Smushed: letters move one column further, so the touching characters merge into one. The font’s designer chooses which merges are allowed — two equal characters,
_with a line or bracket, a hierarchy of| / \ [] {} () <>, opposite brackets becoming|,/\becoming|and><becomingX. Where no rule fits, the letters are only fitted.
Font default uses the spacing the designer set in the font file, which is what the figlet command prints when you give it no layout option.
Where ASCII art looks right
The art only lines up in a monospaced font, where every character is equally wide. That is the case in terminals, code editors, Markdown code blocks (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket), code blocks in Slack and Discord, plain-text e-mail and .txt files. In a document set in a proportional font (for example a Word document in Calibri) the letters drift apart; set those lines in Courier New or Consolas.
For source files, pick the comment style of your language: // for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C, C#, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin and PHP; # for Python, shell, Ruby, R, YAML and Dockerfiles; -- for SQL and Lua; /* … */ for CSS and C; <!-- … --> for HTML, XML and Markdown. If the art itself contains */ or -->, which would end the comment early, the page warns you.
The fonts
All 15 fonts come unchanged from the FIGlet 2.2.5 distribution, which is released under the BSD-3-Clause licence (see the FIGlet licence). The font list names the designer of each one: most were drawn by Glenn Chappell, who wrote most of FIGlet (Standard together with Ian Chai); Banner is by Ryan Youck. Every font draws the printable ASCII characters and the German letters Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü ß; all except Banner also draw accented Latin letters such as é, ñ and ç; Standard, Bubble and Digital add Central European letters such as ł, ő and š, Big adds Greek, and Banner adds Cyrillic and Japanese katakana.
Limitations
- The art needs a monospaced font; in proportional fonts the letters do not line up.
- Characters a font does not draw (emoji, most non-Latin scripts) are left out, as
figletdoes, and the page lists them. - Text wraps at the chosen width; a single letter wider than the width is cut off at the edge.
- Plain text only: no colours. The 15 fonts are the Latin banner fonts of FIGlet 2.2.5; other FIGlet fonts cannot be loaded.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my ASCII art look broken after I paste it?
The place you pasted it uses a proportional font, so narrow characters such as | and wide ones such as _ take different room. Paste it into a code block (choose Markdown code block for GitHub and GitLab; Slack and Discord have code blocks too), a terminal, a code editor or a .txt file, or set the text in a monospaced font such as Courier New or Consolas.
Is this the same as the figlet command?
Yes for these 15 fonts: the generator follows the layout rules of FIGlet 2.2.5 — the font header, the six smushing rules, word wrapping at the width and centre or right alignment — and its output was compared with the original program, character for character, for every font and spacing mode. figlet -w 80 -f slant "text" and this page with Slant at 80 columns give the same art.
What do Full width, Fitted and Smushed do?
Full width keeps each letter’s whole block, so the art is widest. Fitted moves letters together until they touch. Smushed overlaps them by one more column where the touching characters can merge (two | become one, /\ becomes |). Font default uses the setting the font’s designer chose.
Why is a character missing from the art?
The font has no drawing for it — most fonts cover the printable ASCII characters, the German umlauts and accented Latin letters, but not emoji, Chinese or Devanagari. The page lists the characters it left out. Try Standard or Banner, which cover more characters, or write the word without them.
How wide should I make it?
80 columns fits a classic terminal and most code editors without scrolling; 100 or 120 suits wide editors. Choose No wrapping to keep a long line on one row. For source files, keep the art narrower than your project’s line-length limit (often 80, 100 or 120), since the comment marker adds two or three characters.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The fonts load from this site the first time you use them and the art is drawn in your browser; it keeps working offline once the page and fonts have loaded.