ASCII Art Generator
Turn text into big ASCII-art banners with built-in monospace fonts — entirely on this device.
Paste into a fixed-width place — README, code comment, terminal; proportional fonts will misalign it.
Press ? for shortcuts
Do it offline:$ figlet "$(cat message.txt)"
How to use it
- Type or paste a short line of text. These grid fonts are uppercase-only, so lowercase letters are drawn with their uppercase glyphs, and the banner redraws as you type.
- Pick a font: block is the tall bold face, outline is the hollow one, and tiny is a compact three-row face. Choose loose spacing for a one-column gap between letters, or tight to close the gap.
- Read the banner in the fixed-width output pane, and check the chips beneath it — folded lowercase and any character with no glyph in the chosen font are each counted there.
- Copy the banner, download it as a .txt file, or share a permalink. Paste the result somewhere monospaced, such as a README, a code comment or a terminal, or the columns will not line up.
Type a word and it comes back as a big banner built out of ASCII characters — the blocky letterforms you see at the top of a README or a terminal login screen. Choose one of three built-in grid fonts — block, outline or tiny — set the column spacing, and the banner is tiled live from a fixed glyph grid. Everything runs in your browser, and the text you type is never uploaded.
Examples
HELLO# # ##### # # ###
# # # # # # #
##### #### # # # #
# # # # # # #
# # # # # # #
# # ##### ##### ##### ### Five capital letters in the height-six block face, one blank column apart. Every character has a glyph, so no chips fire — nothing folded, nothing dropped.
abc __ |__ __
| | | | |
|--| |__ |
| | | | |
| | |__| |__The hollow outline face carries only uppercase glyphs, so abc is drawn with the A, B and C shapes and a single chip counts the three folded letters.
OK
GO ### # #
# # # #
# # ###
# # ###
# # # #
### # #
#### ###
# # #
# ## # #
# # # #
# # # #
#### ### A line break splits the input into two banners, OK above and GO below, stacked with one blank row between them. Each block keeps its own equal-width rows.
Hi ★# # ##### #####
# # # # #
##### # # #
# # # # #
# # # # #
# # ##### #####H and a folded i render normally and the space becomes blank columns, while the star — U+2605, outside the shipped set — is drawn as the placeholder box and a chip names it at position four.
Every example on this page is executed against the same engine that powers the tool, on every build.
Gotchas worth knowing
It only lines up in fixed-width places
The art is spaced for a monospace grid, so it holds its shape where every character occupies the same width — a README, a code comment, a terminal. Pasted into a proportional font, like most chat boxes, the columns drift and the letters lose their form.
A line break starts a new banner
Each line of the input becomes its own banner, and the blocks stack with a single blank row between them. Windows, classic-Mac and Unix line endings are all treated alike, so pasted multi-line text splits exactly where its breaks were.
The question mark is a real glyph
A literal ? in your text is drawn with the font's own question-mark shape. The box for an unsupported character is a separate placeholder glyph, so an intended ? never looks like a dropped character.
Spaces are kept, tabs become one space
Runs of spaces survive as blank columns, so the banner mirrors the spacing you typed. A tab is quietly drawn as a single space glyph, since a fixed grid has no tab stop to align to.
No wrapping, and a 1 KB limit
A long single line becomes one very wide banner; nothing is wrapped for you, so add your own breaks to stack it. Because each character expands into a whole grid, input is capped at 1 KB and larger text is declined outright.
Common errors
'U+00E9' at position 4 has no glyph in the "block" font — shown as ▯- The chip attached to a character with no glyph in the chosen font — here the é in café, outside the shipped A–Z, 0–9 and punctuation set. It is drawn as the placeholder box, and the chip reports its exact position so nothing vanishes untraced.
3 lowercase letter(s) rendered with uppercase glyphs (these fonts are uppercase-only).- Shown whenever the input carries lowercase letters, because all three faces are uppercase only. Each is rendered with its capital glyph and the tally says how many were folded.
Input is larger than the 1 KB limit for this tool. For longer text use the CLI: figlet "$(cat message.txt)"- What the tool shows instead of a banner once the input passes the cap, with the page's own command-line hand-off. Each character expands into a full grid, so a partial render would mislead — the input is declined whole, and figlet prints the same kind of banner from a file.
FAQ
Why does my banner only line up in some apps?
The letters are spaced for a monospace grid, so they keep their shape only where every character has the same width — a code editor, a README viewer, a terminal. In a proportional font the columns slide out of true and the shapes break.
Can I get lowercase letters in the art?
Not as distinct shapes. All three faces were drawn as uppercase only, so a lowercase letter is rendered with its capital glyph and counted in a chip. There is no separate lowercase design to fall back to, by deliberate scope.
Is this the same as figlet?
It does the same job — turning a line of text into a big letter banner — but with three fonts drawn for this page, so the shapes differ from figlet's own. No figlet font file is bundled or read here; the command-line figlet uses its own fonts instead.
Keyboard shortcuts
- ⌘/Ctrl + Enter
- Redraw the banner immediately, skipping the input debounce.
- ⌘/Ctrl + S
- Save the banner to a .txt file in place of the browser dialog.
- ⌘/Ctrl + C
- Copy the whole banner while no text is selected.
- ⌘/Ctrl + Shift + C
- Force-copy the whole banner even with a selection active.
- t
- Switch to the next color theme.
- ? or ⌘/Ctrl + /
- Open the shortcut overlay.
- Esc
- Close the top overlay; your text is never cleared.