ASCII Text Generator

What an ASCII Text Generator Makes

ASCII is the oldest text standard in computing, a set of 95 printable characters that every keyboard, terminal and programming language can handle. An ASCII text generator uses only those characters to draw each letter as a small picture, several lines tall. Put the lines together and a plain word turns into a banner you can paste anywhere that accepts text.

  _   _      _ _
 | | | | ___| | | ___
 | |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \
 |  _  |  __/ | | (_) |
 |_| |_|\___|_|_|\___/

How FIGlet Fonts Work

The fonts on this page follow the FIGlet format, created in the early 1990s for printing banners in a terminal. A font file is just a list of characters, each stored as a block of text lines. To draw your word, the generator places the blocks side by side. The font also says how close neighbouring letters may sit: far apart, touching, or overlapping where two characters can merge into one. That last option is called smushing, and it is why the same word looks tight in one font and airy in another.

 |_|  _  | |  _
 | | (/_ | | (_)

Picking a Font

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//      // //

Where ASCII Art Belongs

• Source code: a banner at the top of a script, a section divider in a long file or a module name in a comment block.
• README files and plain-text documents: a project title that survives any editor and any mail client.
• Terminals: a welcome message, a login notice or the header of a command-line tool.
• Forums and email signatures: places that strip fonts but keep plain characters.

Making It Display Correctly

ASCII art only lines up in a monospaced font. In a proportional font the rows drift apart, and a clean banner turns into scrambled symbols. Wrap the art in a code block, or paste it into a file that uses a fixed-width font. Keep an eye on width too: an eleven-line font with ten letters can run past eighty columns, so shorten the text or choose a smaller font. Finally, remember readers who use screen readers. They hear the symbols, not the word, so add the word in normal letters nearby. For shorter, one-line effects that work in any app, try the Decorative Text Generator or the Kaomoji Generator.

ASCII Text Generator FAQ