ASCII Art Generator
Type a word and get it back as a banner drawn from plain characters — ready for a terminal, a README or a code comment.
What FIGfonts are
A FIGfont is a text file describing how to draw each letter of the alphabet out of other characters, laid out over several rows. The format dates from the late 1980s and was designed for terminal banners, which is why the fonts still look at home in a shell prompt, a README or a code comment.
Choosing a font that survives
Banner art depends entirely on monospaced rendering. In a proportional font the columns no longer line up and the letterforms collapse into noise. Paste into a code block, a terminal, or anywhere else that uses a fixed-width font — a social post or a document body will almost always mangle it.
Width matters more than you expect
Most of these fonts are six to ten characters wide per letter, so a short word quickly exceeds the width of a terminal or a code block and wraps. Wrapping breaks the art completely, because the rows no longer align. Keep to a few characters, and prefer the narrower fonts for anything longer.
Saving and sharing banner art
Because the output is plain text, it travels through anything that preserves line breaks — a commit message, a README, a chat message in a code block. What breaks it is any system that reflows or re-wraps text, which is why banner art pasted into an email or a social post usually arrives scrambled. If you need it to survive an arbitrary destination, a screenshot is more reliable than the characters.