ASCII art is a picture drawn with text characters instead of pixels. The style dates back to teletype printers and early bulletin board systems, where a banner made of hashes was the only way to put a big headline on a screen that could only draw characters. The lettering style this tool produces is usually called FIGlet art, after the 1991 program that popularised it.

Which fonts does the generator include?

Seven. Standard draws letters from slashes, pipes and underscores — the look most people picture when they hear ASCII art. Block, Banner and Stars are solid letterforms filled with █, # and * respectively. Shadow adds a light drop shadow behind block letters, Slant shears the whole banner to the right, and Mini is a compact version that fits roughly twice as many characters into the same width.

Why is my text converted to capitals?

The built-in fonts only carry uppercase glyphs, so lowercase input is folded up rather than dropped. That matches how most banner fonts are actually used — headline lettering is almost always set in capitals, and a mixed-case banner in a 7-row font is hard to read anyway. Numbers and punctuation pass through unchanged.

Can I use ASCII art in a GitHub README?

Yes, but it has to sit inside a fenced code block. Markdown collapses runs of spaces and reflows lines in normal paragraphs, which turns a banner into a pile of rubble. Wrap the output in triple backticks — with no language tag, so no syntax highlighter tries to colour it — and GitHub will render it in a monospace font exactly as generated.

Why does the art look broken when I paste it somewhere?

Almost always because the destination uses a proportional font, where an i is narrower than an m and the columns stop lining up. ASCII art only holds its shape in a monospace font. In Discord and Slack, wrap it in triple backticks; in Word or Google Docs, select it and switch the font to Courier New or Consolas; in an email, send it as plain text rather than HTML.

Does it work with Cyrillic and other non-Latin letters?

The six bitmap fonts — Block, Banner, Stars, Shadow, Slant and Mini — include the full Cyrillic alphabet, so Russian text renders properly. The Standard line-art font is Latin-only. Any character a font cannot draw is replaced by a blank and listed under the output, so you always know what was dropped rather than silently losing it.

How long can the input be?

200 characters. That is not an arbitrary cap: a single line of Block at default spacing is about twelve columns per character, so even a 20-character word already runs to 240 columns — three times the width of a standard 80-column terminal. Use the wrap width field to fold a long phrase onto several banner rows instead.

How do I add a banner to my CLI program?

Generate it here, download the .txt, and print it at startup. In Python a triple-quoted raw string avoids escaping the backslashes: print(r"""..."""). In Node, a template literal works the same way. Keep it under 80 columns so it does not wrap on a default terminal, and consider skipping it when the output is not a TTY so it never lands in a log file.

Is anything uploaded?

No. The glyph tables and the renderer are plain JavaScript that ships with the page, so the text you type never leaves the tab. The page keeps working offline once it has loaded.

Text to ASCII Art Generator — Big Letters in 7 Fonts

Your text

Font

Letter spacing

Wrap width

Align

Border

Result

  ____   _____  _      _   _  _   _
 | __ ) | ____|| |    | | | || \ | |
 |  _ \ |  _|  | |    | | | ||  \| |
 | |_) || |___ | |___ | |_| || |\  |
 |____/ |_____||_____| \___/ |_| \_|

Font

Standard

Columns

Rows

Characters

Fonts — click to switch

Type a word and it comes back as a banner built from text characters — the kind of ASCII art that goes at the top of a README, into a CLI splash screen, or into a terminal MOTD. Seven fonts are built in, from the classic slash-and-pipe FIGlet look to solid block letters with a drop shadow. Everything renders in your own browser, so nothing you type is uploaded.

The seven fonts, side by side

Every font below is drawn by the same code that renders your text, so what you see here is exactly what you get. Widths are per character at the font's default letter spacing — useful when you are trying to keep a banner inside an 80-column terminal.