FIGlet

FIGlet (Frank, Ian & Glenn's Letters) is a program that creates large characters out of ordinary screen characters. It can print in a variety of fonts, both left-to-right and right-to-left, with adjacent characters kerned and "smushed" together in various ways. FIGlet output is generally reminiscent of the sort of "signatures" many people like to put at the end of e-mail, Usenet and MOTD messages.

More fonts can be downloaded from the JavE FIGlet fonts library: http://www.jave.de/figlet/fonts/overview.html

Commonly used command line options are:

• -f fontfile: Select the font. The .flf suffix may be left off of fontfile.
• -d fontdirectory: Change the default font directory. FIGlet looks for fonts first in the default directory and then in the current directory.
• -c, -l, -r, -x: These options handle the justification of FIGlet output. -c centers the output horizontally. -l makes the output flush-left. -r makes it flush-right. -x (default) sets the justification according to whether left-to-right or right-to-left text is selected.
• -t, -w outputwidth: These options control the output width. Normally, FIGlet assumes 80 columns. -t sets the output width to the terminal width.
• -p, -n: These options control how FIGlet handles newlines. -p puts FIGlet into paragraph mode, which eliminates some unnecessary line breaks. -n (default) puts FIGlet back to normal, in which every newline FIGlet reads causes it to produce a line break.
• -s, -S, -k, -W, -o: These options control how FIGlet spaces characters. -s (default) and -S cause "smushing" (characters are displayed as close together as possible), -k causes "kerning" (as many blanks as possible are removed between characters), -W makes FIGlet display all characters in full width, which may be fixed or variable, depending on the font. The difference between -s and -S is that -s will not smush a font whose author specified kerning or full width as the default layoutmode, whereas -S will attempt to do so.

See the complete list of command line options in the developer website.