ASCII Art Generator
Letters, digits and spaces. Up to 12 characters, longer banners wrap badly in most terminals.
### #### #### ##### ##### # # # # # # ##### ### # # # # # # # # # # # #### #### ##### #####
The ASCII art generator renders up to 12 characters as a five-row banner made of text, suitable for a terminal, a README or a code comment. Four styles are available, and they share one glyph set. The difference is the character used to fill each lit pixel.
How it works
Every supported character has a five-row bitmap, mostly five columns wide. The renderer walks the rows of every letter in parallel and appends them side by side, with a single space between letters.
- Block fills with #, which is the safest choice because it is plain ASCII and renders identically everywhere.
- Solid fills with the Unicode full block, which looks denser but needs a font that includes it.
- Stars fills with *, useful where # is meaningful, in a Markdown heading, for instance.
- Banner fills each letter with itself, so an A is drawn out of As. This is the classic figlet banner style.
Supported characters are A to Z, 0 to 9, space, full stop, hyphen, exclamation mark and question mark. Lowercase input is converted to uppercase, since the glyph set has one case. Anything unsupported is skipped rather than drawn as a gap.
Examples
A short word in block style
Text
HI
Style
Block (#)
Result
# # ##### # # # ##### # # # # # # #####
Each letter is five rows tall and five columns wide, joined with one space between them, giving an 11-column banner for two letters.
The same word in banner style
Text
HI
Style
Banner
Result
H H IIIII H H I HHHHH I H H I H H IIIII
The bitmap is identical; only the fill character changes, and in banner style each letter is drawn using itself.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the ASCII art generator limited to 12 characters?
Because each character is six columns wide including its spacing, so 12 characters is already 72 columns, the traditional terminal width. Longer banners wrap mid-letter in most terminals, which makes them unreadable.
Do the four styles use different fonts?
No, and the page says so rather than implying otherwise. All four share one five-row glyph set; they differ only in which character fills a lit pixel. Banner is the exception in that its fill character changes per letter.
Which style is safest for a README or a code comment?
Block, because # is plain ASCII and renders in every font and encoding. The solid style uses a Unicode block character that some monospace fonts do not include, and it will show as a replacement box if the font is missing it.
What happens to characters that are not supported?
They are skipped entirely rather than drawn as a blank space. Supported characters are A to Z, 0 to 9, space, full stop, hyphen, exclamation mark and question mark.