ASCII Banner Text
Render text as a multi-line ASCII art banner.
Overview
Type a short phrase and get back a multi-line ASCII art banner suitable for CLI splash screens, README headings, or terminal MOTDs. Pick from several built-in fonts (block, slim, shadow, 3D) and copy the output straight to your clipboard.
This is for developers who want to add a bit of personality to their CLI tools, build pipelines, or terminal dotfiles without pulling in figlet as a runtime dependency. Reach for it when generating a startup banner for a service, dressing up a CI log header, or making a project's README a touch more memorable.
How it works
The renderer follows the FIGlet character-shape convention - each character is drawn as a fixed-height grid of substitution glyphs, then horizontally concatenated with kerning controlled by the font's "smush rules." Larger fonts use box-drawing or shading characters to imitate 3D effects.
Output is plain ASCII (or Unicode for the shaded variants) wrapped at the chosen width, so it pastes cleanly into a monospaced context like a terminal, code comment, or pre-formatted block in Markdown.
Examples
- Short label, block style:
┌─┐┬ ┬┌─┐┌─┐ ├─ │ │└─┐└─┐ └ └─┘└─┘└─┘ - "Hello" in standard FIGlet:
_ _ _ _ | | | | ___| | | ___ | |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \ | _ | __/ | | (_) | |_| |_|\___|_|_|\___/ - Use as a Bash MOTD by piping to
cat:cat banner.txt - Embed in Node startup:
console.log(fs.readFileSync('banner.txt', 'utf8'));
FAQ
Will the banner render correctly in all terminals?
Plain ASCII variants work everywhere. The shaded fonts use Unicode box-drawing characters - safe on UTF-8 terminals (essentially every modern shell) but garbled on legacy 8-bit code pages.
Can I use this in a multi-line shell prompt?
You'd want a single-line variant - multi-line banners belong in MOTDs or startup splash screens, not PS1. For prompts, use a short ANSI-coloured string.
How wide is the output?
Width depends on font and input - block fonts run 4-8 columns per character. Test against an 80-column terminal if you're targeting compatibility with older width assumptions.
Is this Unicode-safe for non-Latin input?
The FIGlet character set is ASCII letters, digits, and basic punctuation. Non-Latin characters fall back to the font's missing-glyph placeholder.