Typecase

ASCII Banner Generator

Words built out of characters, five rows tall. Pick the block you want them drawn with — and read the note about code blocks before pasting this into Discord.

Drawn with 0 chars
Banner

What this ASCII banner generator does

It draws your text as oversized letters, each one built from a grid of repeated characters, five rows tall. The control above changes which character does the drawing, which changes the weight of the result considerably — a solid block reads as filled, a hash reads as textured.

How it actually works

This is the one tool on the site that does no Unicode substitution at all. There is no block of giant letters to look up, because giant letters are not characters — they are pictures made of characters.

Inside the tool each letter is stored as a tiny bitmap: a grid of five rows, marked cell by cell for ink or blank. The letter A is a five-row pattern that happens to look like an A when the marked cells are filled in. To render a word, the tool takes the first row of every letter's grid and joins them side by side, then does the same for the second row, and so on. Five passes produce five lines of text which, stacked, read as a word.

The approach descends from FIGlet, a program written in the 1990s for exactly this purpose, which in turn descends from the banner pages that line printers produced to separate one person's printout from the next.

It only works in a monospace font. The illusion depends on every character occupying an identical width so the columns line up. Paste a banner into a bio, a message or anywhere else using a proportional font and the rows shear apart into nonsense. In Discord and most chat apps, wrap it in a triple-backtick code block; in a terminal, a README or a code comment it works as-is.

Where people use it

  • Terminal login banners and the message-of-the-day file on a server.
  • Section headers in source files, where a large comment banner marks a boundary in a long file.
  • README files on GitHub, inside a fenced code block at the top of the project.
  • Discord announcements, wrapped in a code block so the alignment holds.
  • Command-line tool splash screens and build script output.

Questions about ASCII banners

Why does my banner look scrambled after I paste it?

Almost certainly because it landed in a proportional font, where an i is narrower than an m. The banner depends on every column being the same width. Wrap it in a code block, or paste it somewhere that uses a monospace font, and the rows will line up again.

How do I post a banner in Discord?

Put three backticks on the line above it and three on the line below. That makes Discord render the whole thing as a code block in a monospace font, which preserves the alignment. Without the code block the letters will not line up.

Which characters can I turn into a banner?

Letters A to Z, the digits zero to nine, and a set of common punctuation marks including the exclamation mark, question mark, full stop, comma, apostrophe, hyphen, colon, brackets, slash, plus, equals, asterisk and hash. Lowercase input is drawn using the capital shapes. Anything unsupported is skipped rather than replaced with a gap.

Why does long text wrap onto more rows?

Each letter is about five columns wide, so a word of sixteen letters is already past eighty columns — the traditional terminal width. The tool breaks lines at word boundaries before that point, leaving a blank line between blocks. Short words give the best results.

Can I use a banner in my Instagram bio?

It will not work. Bio fields use a proportional font and wrap text at their own width, so the rows shear and break apart. ASCII banners belong in monospace contexts: terminals, code files and code blocks.

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