Text to ASCII Art Generator

How it works

Type a short text into the left pane: a project name, a greeting or a heading. The tool turns each letter into a multi-line drawing taken from a FIGlet font; "Hello" in Standard becomes a banner 6 lines tall and about 23 characters wide. The longest line setting decides how wide the drawing may get: 80 characters suits a classic terminal window, and a word that does not fit moves down to the next block. Standard includes accented Latin letters; Big, Slant and Small lack a few of them, and Banner has no accents at all. Letters that a font lacks are drawn without their accent, and the summary line lists which ones changed. When you paste the result into a README, a code comment or a Discord message, make sure it is shown in a monospace font, or the letters will drift apart.

This tool is also known as text to ascii art, ascii art generator, ascii text banner, figlet online, ascii art font, big ascii letters.

What is ASCII art?

ASCII art is a picture or lettering made only from plain keyboard characters such as letters, digits and the signs / \ | _ #. It fills the role of a logo or heading where images are not possible: terminals, source-code comments, plain-text emails and README files. It needs a monospace font, where every character takes the same width, to line up correctly.

What is FIGlet?

FIGlet is an open-source program from 1991 that turns ordinary text into large letters made of ASCII characters. Each font is a .flf file holding a multi-line drawing for every character. When placing letters side by side, FIGlet pushes their edges together (smushing), so the output looks tighter than letters simply pasted next to each other. This page uses figlet.js, the JavaScript port.

ASCII art vs fancy Unicode text: what is the difference?

Fancy text swaps each letter for a bold, italic or script-like Unicode character; it stays on one line and flows like normal text in an Instagram bio or a username. ASCII art turns each letter into a drawing several lines tall; it uses only plain characters but needs a monospace font. Use the Fancy Text Generator for social profiles and this tool for terminal and README headings.

The catch: proportional fonts break the drawing

ASCII art assumes every character is the same width. Paste it into Word, an email or a chat that uses a proportional font and "i" and "m" take different widths, so the letters slide apart. Terminals, code editors, GitHub README code blocks (opened with three backticks) and Discord code blocks all use monospace fonts, and the drawing looks right there.

On a phone the right-hand pane may wrap long lines; that affects only what you see on screen, not the text you copy. Trailing spaces at the end of each line are trimmed so the art does not drag invisible spaces into your file.

Which font works where?

The five fonts draw at different heights and widths:

• README heading or project logo → Standard or Big
• Terminal welcome message, narrow space → Small (5 lines)
• Dynamic heading → Slant
• Printed banner that must be read from a distance → Banner (8 lines of #)
• Text with accents such as é or ñ → Standard

Frequently asked questions

Why do accented letters change in some fonts?

FIGlet fonts were drawn in the 1990s for English. Standard was later extended with Central European letters; the others were not. Plain figlet silently drops a letter the font lacks, so "Café" would come out as "Caf". This tool draws the plain letter instead and says so in the summary line.

Can I draw emoji or Cyrillic letters?

No. These five fonts contain no non-Latin letters and no emoji; characters that cannot be drawn are skipped and listed in the summary line.

Can I write several lines?

Yes. Every line in the input pane is drawn as its own block with a blank line in between. A long single line wraps at word boundaries according to the line width you choose.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. The fonts come with the page and the drawing is made in your browser; the text never leaves your device.