Text Art Generator

Put it in a code block. Discord shows normal messages in a proportional font, which shears the letters apart; inside a code block (three backticks on the line before and after) it uses a monospace font and keeps every space. Choose “Discord / Markdown code block” under Copy as and the backticks are added for you. Keep banners under about 40 columns if people read on phones, or Discord wraps the lines.

FIGlet is a program from 1991 by Glenn Chappell and Ian Chai that prints text as large letters made of ordinary characters. Its fonts are plain-text .flf files in which every letter is drawn as a small block of characters, plus rules for how neighbouring letters may overlap. This tool reads the original FIGlet font files and lays letters out the way FIGlet 2.2.5 does, so the banners match what the figlet command prints.

They are FIGlet’s three ways of placing letters side by side. Full width puts each letter’s block next to the last one with its built-in spacing. Fitted slides letters together until they touch. Smushed slides them one column further so the edges merge, following each font’s smushing rules — for example, two | characters become one and a _ under a / gives way to the /. Font default uses whatever the font designer chose, which for most fonts here is smushed.

The Big Text Generator draws letters with one simple five-row font made of # signs, and also offers fullwidth Unicode letters for bios. Text Art uses 13 real FIGlet fonts — Standard, Slant, Big, Shadow, Banner, Script, Bubble and others — with proper letter joining, wrapping to a column width, comment formats for source code, and a gallery of small drawings. If you want to turn a picture into characters instead, use the Image to ASCII converter.

Multi-line banners only hold their shape where text is shown in a monospace font, which those apps do not use, so the columns drift. Use the one-line pieces instead: the Faces and Dividers in the gallery are single lines built from Unicode symbols and paste cleanly into posts, bios and chat. Some faces use characters from Japanese, Kannada or other scripts, which appear as boxes on devices without those fonts.

Every font covers the printable ASCII set — A–Z, a–z, digits and punctuation — plus Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, ü and ß, which the FIGlet format requires. Other accented letters and emoji are not in these fonts; they are skipped, and the tool lists any skipped characters under the result so nothing disappears silently. Some fonts, such as Banner, draw lowercase letters as capitals.