Check out Calligraphy, which hit Flathub this week. This GTK4/libadwaita app is composed specifically for the task of generating giant, eye-catching typographic print outs.
Or, to quote the developers own blurb, this app lets you convert regular text into “impressive banners made up of ASCII characters” to “spice up your online conversations” and add “extra oompf to your messages”.
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|_|_|_|____| __|_| |_|_|___/The ASCII art fonts/styles available in Calligraphy will be familiar to those who’ve used Figlet, a popular command-line tool used to generate ASCII text blocks. This is because the app is a GUI frontend to pyfiglet, which is a pure Python implementation of Figlet.
This makes Calligraphy a powerful Figlet alternative that is easier to use as, unlike the command-line version, you don’t need to remember which -arguments generate which styles (though some features, like kerning, aren’t present here).
And talking of styles: there are a lot. These are accessed from a drop down menu which, helpfully, also has a search bar. This means you can quickly use a particularly style you know the name of.
Here are a few styles I think give good (i.e. readable) results:
- mini
- nancyj
- poison
- rounded
- fraktur
- basic
- chunky
- small
- letters
- isometric1
- graffiti
Anyway, that’s enough waffle from me. Go give Calligraphy a go and let me know what you think of it down in the comments section — with guaranteed upvotes for anyone replying with some ASCII art! ????
• Get Calligraphy on Flathub