Text Art: Copy and Paste Pictures and Big Letters

How to copy a text art picture

1. Pick a picture on the Pictures tab: cats, animals, hearts, flowers, a birthday cake, one-line art like the fish ><(((º>, or a border to put between paragraphs. Search works too: cat, love, moon, divider.
2. Tap it to copy every line at once. The picture flashes “Copied”.
3. Paste it somewhere that keeps its shape (see below).

Pictures you copy wait for you in Recently copied, stored in this browser only, and Share result turns them into a link for a friend.

How to make big letters from your words

1. Open the Big letters tab and type up to 40 characters. Every font redraws as you type, so you can compare them side by side.
2. Set Line width if the result is too wide: at 40 characters, long phrases wrap onto more rows so they fit a narrow chat window; No limit keeps everything on one row.
3. Press Copy under the font you like. Tick the code block option first if you’re pasting into a chat or forum that understands Markdown.

The number next to each font name is how many characters wide the result is. The eight fonts are classic FIGlet fonts: Standard, Big, Slant, Small, Shadow, Banner, Block and Script. Glenn Chappell wrote the first version of FIGlet in spring 1991 (FIGlet history), and its fonts are free to use and share under the program’s BSD licence. Letters are fitted together the way FIGlet does it, so they overlap and join just as they do in the original.

Keeping the shape when you paste

Text art only lines up in a monospaced font, where an i is as wide as an m. Most chat apps and social networks use proportional fonts, which squeeze narrow characters and push the lines out of step. What helps:

• Code blocks. Where Markdown works, text between two lines of three backticks (```) is shown as code, in a monospaced font and without extra line wrapping. The big letters maker can add the backticks for you.
• Plain text places: code editors, terminals, a notes app or an email set to a monospaced font (Courier, Consolas, Menlo) all keep the shape.
• Small screens: a line longer than the screen wraps and breaks the picture. Keep big letters to a short word, or use the 40-character width.
• One-line art and dividers are the exception: they are a single row, so they survive almost anywhere, including usernames, captions and bios.

Characters the fonts can draw

Every big letter font draws the English alphabet, digits and the punctuation on a US keyboard. Most also include accented Latin letters (é, ñ, ü and others). A character a font doesn’t have, such as an emoji or a Chinese character, is left out of that font’s result and named in a note above the results, so nothing disappears without you knowing.

The multi-line pictures were drawn for this page from plain ASCII characters, so every monospaced font lines them up the same way; the one-liners and dividers also use symbols such as ♪, ☆ and ✿. For single symbols like ♥ or ★, use the copy and paste symbols page, and for faces like (＾▽＾) see kaomoji.