ASCII art generator

The font here is five rows tall and built in, rather than loaded from a figlet file. That is a size decision: a real figlet font is tens of kilobytes for one typeface, and this page has a JavaScript budget to keep. Five rows is enough to be clearly legible in a terminal or a code comment, which is where these end up.

ASCII art in this sense goes back to teletypes, where the only way to make a heading was to type characters in the shape of letters. It survives because a plain-text file has no other way to emphasise anything — which is why you still find banners at the top of source files, in terminal splash screens and in the output of command-line tools.

A practical note on where it breaks. The banner only lines up in a monospace font, where every character is the same width. Pasted into an email, a word processor or most chat apps it becomes a jumble, because those render in a proportional font where an M is wider than an i. Code comments, terminals, README files and anywhere marked as code will be fine.

Unsupported characters are dropped and named rather than substituted. A question mark standing in for a missing glyph reads as though it were part of the text, which is worse than an obvious gap.