Figlet – An Awesome Application for ASCII Word Art
Let’s say you are writing a script of some sort and you want to create a large text graphic in the header of your file. You think to yourself, self, I can use ASCII characters to draw it (ASCII art). Then you realize it takes a lot of time and effort to do. There has got to be a better way. Yes, there is! It’s called Figlet.
Figlet will draw out text in large ASCII characters for you. It does all the work so you don’t have to. Below is an example:
This is how we can install Figlet on Debian/Ubuntu/Linuxmint Linux distributions. First we update our packages cache to make sure we have the latest (this is standard practice). Next we install Figlet. Open a shell (terminal) and type the following:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install figlet
Now we can use Figlet to create some large text using the defaults and output it into a text file. Open a shell (terminal) and type:
This will save a file called Hello.txt containing the word Hello in ASCII art to the current directory. You can open Hello.txt in your favorite text document application to see the results.
figlet Hello > ./Hello.txt
Figlet can also use other fonts. Use the -f switch to use a different font than the default:
figlet -f banner Howdy
To see more available fonts type showfigfonts in a shell (terminal),
Type this into a text file and set the execute flag on it. Then run it in a shell (terminal). It won’t hurt anything. Can you figure out what it will do?
#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ];
do
clear
date +%r | figlet
sleep 1
done
Wikipedia has more information about Figlet.