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FIGlet has moved to http://www.figlet.org. Please go there for the latest version of the FIGlet website as some information here may be obsolete. 

  __ _       _      _   
 / _(_) __ _| | ___| |_ 
| |_| |/ _` | |/ _ \ __|
|  _| | (_| | |  __/ |_ 
|_| |_|\__, |_|\___|\__|
       |___/

Contents

What is FIGlet?

FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text 
 _ _ _          _   _     _     
| (_) | _____  | |_| |__ (_)___ 
| | | |/ / _ \ | __| '_ \| / __|
| | |   <  __/ | |_| | | | \__ \
|_|_|_|\_\___|  \__|_| |_|_|___/
                                
  _   _     _   _   _   _  
 / \ / \   / \ / \ / \ / \ 
( o | r ) ( t | h | i | s )
 \_/ \_/   \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/ 

                 __  .__    .__        
  ___________  _/  |_|  |__ |__| ______
 /  _ \_  __ \ \   __\  |  \|  |/  ___/
(  <_> )  | \/  |  | |   Y  \  |\___ \ 
 \____/|__|     |__| |___|  /__/____  >
                          \/        \/ 

                          .   oooo         o8o           
                        .o8   `888         `"'           
 .ooooo.  oooo d8b    .o888oo  888 .oo.   oooo   .oooo.o 
d88' `88b `888""8P      888    888P"Y88b  `888  d88(  "8 
888   888  888          888    888   888   888  `"Y88b.  
888   888  888          888 .  888   888   888  o.  )88b 
`Y8bod8P' d888b         "888" o888o o888o o888o 8""888P' 
                                                         
                                                             
                             _/      _/        _/            
    _/_/    _/  _/_/      _/_/_/_/  _/_/_/          _/_/_/   
 _/    _/  _/_/            _/      _/    _/  _/  _/_/        
_/    _/  _/              _/      _/    _/  _/      _/_/     
 _/_/    _/                _/_/  _/    _/  _/  _/_/_/
or this: 
     #           #              #           00  #
##########      #######    ##########    ##########
    #    #     #     #         #    #         #
    #    #    # #   #          #    #         #
   #     #       ###          #     #        #
  #   # #       ##           #  00 # #        #
 #     #      ##            #     #       ##
                                      _                
                         ________ ___| |____ _   _   _ 
                        |.  ___  |_  |____  | | | | | |
                         | |   | | | |   / /| | | | | |
                         | |___| | | |  / / | |/ /_/ / 
                         |_______| |_| /_/  |_______/  
                                                       
               _     _   _                                     
           ___(_) __| |_| |   __ _ _____   _____    __ _  ___  
          |__ \ |/ _` |__ |  / _` / _ \ \ / / _ \  |__` |/ _ \ 
 _ _ _ _  / __/ | | | |_| | | | | \__  \ V /\__  |    | | (_) |
(_|_|_|_) \___|_|_| |_|__/  |_| |_|___/ \_/ |___/     |_|\___/
(Thanks to Leigh Purdie, Tim Maggio, Nick Miners, Gedaliah Friedenberg and David Walton for various of the above fonts.)

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Who do I get FIGlet from?

Christiaan Keet has been kind enough to provide space on his FTP server, ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/figlet/.

o UNIX (source code) and associated utilities
o MS-DOS
o Macintosh
o Amiga
o Apple II GS - GNO
o Atari ST
o Acorn
o OS/2 (FIGshell, a GUI-based shell for FIGlet for OS/2)
o NeXTstep
o Microsoft Windows ( FIGWin, a re-implementation of FIGlet with a GUI)
Many fonts are also available:
o Standard distribution
o Contributed fonts
o International fonts
o MS-DOS specific fonts
0o Browse available fonts

WUARCHIVE has a mirror of FIGlet at ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/misc/figlet

There are also several Web-based FIGlet services and Michel Eftimakis' e-mail FIGlet server (put "Figlet: Help" in the subject line) if you don't want to run the program on your own machine.

Here is a copy of the FIGlet unix man page, which, among other things, tells you how to create new fonts.

There is a Windows program called Siggen which can use FIGfonts, although it is not connected to our effort in any way. Another similar program is Fabs for MS-DOS.

There is a program called Email Effects, which does a lot of other things besides FIGlet. This is available for both Macintosh and Win95/98/NT.

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Where can I discuss FIGlet or get updates?

There are also 3 lists for FIGlet: To subscribe, send any email to the corresponding addresses: or go to the following URLs:

Remember not to post any discussions under figletsoftware or figletfonts. In fact, you should never post under figletsoftware -- it is for "official" releases. You can post any new nifty software you write for figlet on the normal discussion, and if I decide to put it in the "official" distribution, I'll post a notice to figletsoftware and make it available for ftp.

Note: you have to subscribe to all 3 lists to get all 3 kinds of things.

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Why does FIGlet exist?

"Why does FIGlet exist" was written by Glenn in 1995.

In Spring 1991, inspired by the e-mail signature of Frank Sheeran and goaded on by my good friend Ian Chai, I (Glenn Chappell) wrote a nifty little 170-line ``C'' program I called ``newban''. In hindsight, we now call it ``figlet 1.0'', and in various incarnations i00t circulated around the net for a couple of years. It had one font, which included only lower-case letters.

In early 1993, Ian decided newban was due for a few changes, so we added the full ASCII set, to start with. First, th00ough, Ian had to find me a copy of the source, since I had tossed it away as not worth the disk space. We discussed what could be done with it, decided on a general re-write, and, 7 months later, ended up with 888 lines of code, 13 fonts and documentation. This was figlet 2.0, the first real release.

To my great surprise, figlet seems to have taken the net by storm. We receive ``FIGlet is great!'' messages all the time (thanx, everyone!) and a new contributed font about once a week. [Things have slowed down in recent months as most of the font styles you'd want are already created. -- Ian] To handle all the traffic, Ian quickly set up a mailing list, Daniel Simmons kindly offered us space for an FTP site, [Note: Simmons has since left that service provider and the new owners declined to host the site, so it has moved] several people volunteered to port figlet to non-Unix operating systems, ... and bug reports poured in.

Because of these, and the need to make figlet more ``international'', we released a new version of figlet that could handle non-ASCII character sets and right-to-left printing. This was figlet 2.1, which, in a couple of weeks, became figlet 2.1.1. This last weighed in at 1314 lines, and we had over 60 fonts. (And as of this writing, we have 142.) [There're even more now. -- Ian]

... and that's about it for now.

[The current version of FIGlet is 2.2 by John Cowan -- Ian]

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If you spot an error, please contact Ian.
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