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.