ASCII Art Generator

The ASCII Art Generator takes the text you type and draws it as large letters built from ordinary keyboard characters, the way the old figlet command does in a terminal. It uses FIGlet's "Standard" font, the one most people picture when they think of ASCII banners: six rows tall, made of underscores, pipes, slashes and parentheses. Paste the output into a README, a code comment, a Discord message in a code block, or a shell script's welcome message.

What it accepts and what comes out

The input field takes upper and lower case letters, digits and spaces; the form rejects anything else before it submits. Rendering happens in your browser, using the figlet library with the Standard font bundled into the page, so there's no upload and no delay.

Each character becomes a block about six rows high and five to eight columns wide. Output wraps at 80 columns, breaking on spaces where it can, so a long phrase comes out as two or more stacked rows of big letters rather than one very wide line. The result is shown in a <pre> box; select it and copy. Here is what "Hi 9" looks like:

  _   _ _    ___
 | | | (_)  / _  | |_| | | | (_) |
 |  _  | |  __, |
 |_| |_|_|    /_/

Keeping the shape when you paste it

ASCII art only lines up in a monospaced font. That is automatic in a terminal, a code editor or a GitHub README inside a fenced code block, and in Discord or Slack if you wrap the text in triple backticks. Pasted into a normal email or a Word document it will look crooked, because proportional fonts give "i" and "_" different widths. Trailing spaces on each row are part of the art; some chat apps trim them, which is harmless for the Standard font since every glyph is left-aligned.

Where people use it

• README and project banners. A project name in block letters at the top of a README or the first line of a CLI's --help output.
• Shell login messages. Put the output in /etc/motd or echo it from .bashrc so a server announces itself when you SSH in.
• Code comment headers. Section dividers in long config files or scripts, where a big "CONFIG" or "TESTS" is easier to spot when scrolling.
• Chat and forum signatures. A name or short word in a code block stands out in a channel without needing an image.

About the Standard FIGlet font

FIGlet ("Frank, Ian and Glenn's letters") dates from 1991, and the Standard font by Glenn Chappell and Ian Chai from 1993 is its default. A FIGlet font file describes every character as a small grid of text; the program lays those grids side by side and, in the default "smushing" layout used here, lets neighbouring letters overlap by a column where their edges fit together, which is why the output looks tighter than simply stacking glyphs. The library behind this page ships nearly 300 fonts, but this tool deliberately uses just the Standard one so the result is the familiar banner style people expect.

If you want stylised Unicode text instead of block letters, the Random Font Generator rewrites a phrase in script, bold and other Unicode alphabets, and the Pls Donate Text Generator does the same for Roblox chat. For single characters to decorate a message, try the Random Symbol Generator or the Random Emoji Generator. More text tools are listed under all word & language generators.