Tuesday, April 08, 2014

FIGlets ?

I had used Unix banner many times, but I had never bothered to check, how other cool looking typefaces were generated. Most often, on starting up some open source server/daemon, you'd come across a banner like:

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

Though I was sure these were not manually typed on an editor!, I never probed much. For some reason, today I wanted to put one such banner for my daemon, at start-up. So, on some Google digging, I found the source - FIGlet fonts. 

But no need to install the figlet utility, instead, try this web app - TAAG (Text to ASCII Art Generator). And, if you are working on an application - add a FIGlet banner ;-)

--EDIT-- (30-apr)

After playing around and having fun with FIGlets, I learnt about TOIlet :) (now, wait, hold your imagination), its FIGlet + filters, and how colorful!.

Look at the project page, its much more than just colorful banners!

2 comments:

Nagendra said...

Hi Ani, So how do you go about , getting this loaded/started. Do we add this to your .cshrc or other profile files?

Ani said...

Hi Nagendra, If you want to use it as `banner' - as in display something when logged into a machine - then you could pipe the output to /etc/motd.tail (from .bash_profile). In my case - I have embedded the generated banner into my [C] code, to display on application startup.