FIGLET(6) v2.1 FIGLET(6)
12 Aug 1994
NAME
figlet - print in large characters made up of ordinary screen
characters
SYNOPSIS
figlet [ -clnprtvxDELNRX ] [ -d fontdirectory ]
[ -f fontfile ] [ -m smushmode ] [ -w outputwidth ]
[ -C controlfile ] [ -I infocode ]
DESCRIPTION
figlet prints its input using large characters made up of ordinary
screen characters. figlet output is generally reminiscent of the sort
of ``signatures'' many people like to put at the end of e-mail and
UseNet messages. It is also reminiscent of the output of some banner
programs, although it is oriented normally, not sideways.
figlet 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 fonts are stored in separate files, which can be
identified by the suffix ``.flf''. Most figlet font files will be
stored in figlet's default font directory.
figlet can also use ``control files'', which tell it to map certain
input characters to certain other characters, similar to the Unix tr
command. Control files can be identified by the suffix ``.flc''.
Most figlet control files will be stored in figlet's default font
directory.
OTHER FONTS & MAILING LIST
As of this writing you can get many fonts which are not in the basic
figlet package by anonymous FTP from ftp.nicoh.com:pub/figlet/fonts.
ftp.nicoh.com:pub/figlet should also contain the latest version of
figlet and other utilities related to figlet. Of special interest are
non-Roman fonts. As of this writing, there are Hebrew and Cyrillic
(Russian) fonts; more are expected.
We run an e-mail list dedicated to figlet software and font
announcements, as well as general discussion about figlet. If you
would like to be on this list, send e-mail to
listserv@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu with the message body
subscribe figlet-l YOUR NAME
where YOUR NAME should be replaced with your name. For those who
don't want to be bothered with the discussions, the list can be
configured so that you only see software update notices, or only
software and font announcements.
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USAGE
Just start up figlet (type ``figlet'') and then type whatever you
want. Alternatively, pipe a file or the output of another command
through figlet. See EXAMPLES for other things to do.
OPTIONS
figlet reads command line options from left to right, and only the
last option that affects a parameter has any effect. Every option has
an inverse, so that, for example, if figlet is customized with a C-
shell alias, all the options are still available.
Commonly-used options are -f, -c, -m0, -t, -p and -v.
-f fontfile
Select the font. The .flf suffix may be left off of fontfile, in
which case figlet automatically appends it. figlet looks for the
file first in the default font directory and then in the current
directory, or, if fontfile was given as a full pathname, in the
given directory. If the -f option is not specified, figlet uses
the font that was specified when it was compiled. To find out
which font this is, use the -I3 option.
-d fontdirectory
Change the default font directory. figlet looks for fonts first
in the default directory and then in the current directory. If
the -d option is not specified, figlet uses the directory that
was specified when it was compiled. To find out which directory
this is, use the -I2 option.
-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. Left-to-right text will be flush-left, while right-
to-left text will be flush-right. (Left-to-right versus right-
to-left text is controlled by -L, -R and -X.)
-t
-w outputwidth
These options control the outputwidth, or the screen width figlet
assumes when formatting its output. figlet uses the outputwidth
to determine when to break lines and how to center the output.
Normally, figlet assumes 80 columns so that people with wide
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terminals won't annoy the people they e-mail figlet output to.
-t sets the outputwidth to the terminal width. If the terminal
width cannot be determined, the previous outputwidth is retained.
-w sets the outputwidth to the given integer. An outputwidth of
1 is a special value that tells figlet to print each non-space
character, in its entirety, on a separate line, no matter how
wide it is.
-p
-n These options control how figlet handles newlines. -p puts
figlet into ``paragraph mode'', which eliminates some unnecessary
line breaks when piping a multi-line file through figlet. In
paragraph mode, figlet treats line breaks within a paragraph as
if they were merely blanks between words. (Specifically, -p
causes figlet to convert any newline which is not preceded by a
newline and not followed by a space character into a blank.) -n
puts figlet back to normal (default), in which every newline
figlet reads causes it to produce a line break.
-D
-E -D switches to the German (Deutsch) character set. Turns `[',
`\' and `]' into umlauted A, O and U, respectively. `{', `|' and
`}' turn into the respective lower case versions of these. `~'
turns into s-z. (Of course, all this assumes the font author has
placed German characters in these positions in the font file.
Many font authors do not.) -E switches back to English (default),
i.e., the standard ASCII character set.
-C controlfile
-N These options deal with figlet controlfiles. A controlfile is a
file containing a list of commands that figlet executes each time
it reads a character. These commands can map certain input
characters to other characters, similar to the Unix tr command or
the figlet -D option. figlet maintains a list of controlfiles,
which is empty when figlet starts up. -C adds the given
controlfile to the list. -N clears the controlfile list,
cancelling the effect of any previous -C. figlet executes the
commands in all controlfiles in the list. See CONTROLFILE FORMAT
for details on how to write a controlfile.
-m smushmode
Specifies how figlet should ``smush'' and kern consecutive
characters together. On the command line, -m0 can be useful, as
it tells figlet to kern characters without smushing them
together. Otherwise, this option is rarely needed, as a figlet
font file specifies the best smushmode to use with the font. -m
is, therefore, most useful to font designers testing the various
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smushmodes with their font. smushmode can be -2 through 63.
-2 Get mode from font file (default).
Every figlet font file specifies the best smushmode to use
with the font. This will be one of the smushmodes (-1
through 63) described in the following paragraphs.
-1 No smushing or kerning.
Characters are simply concatenated together.
0 Kern only.
Characters are pushed together until they touch.
In any non-negative smushmode figlet kerns adjacent font
characters, i.e., it pushes adjacent font characters
together until their non-blank portions touch. At that
point, it may or may not push the two font characters 1
screen character closer, depending on the smushmode.
Pushing font characters one step closer requires
``smushing'' two non-blank screen characters into a single
screen character. figlet has 6 ways of doing this,
represented by 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32. The various non-
negative smushmodes (0-63) are obtained by adding up the
numbers corresponding to the sort of smushing figlet should
do. In particular smushmode 0 kerns characters without
smushing them into each other.
1 Smush equal characters.
Two screen characters are smushed into a single character if
they are the same. The resulting character is the same as
both of the original characters. This mode does not smush
the character known as a hardblank, which is a character
that prints as a blank, but is not smushed (except in mode
32). See FONT FILE FORMAT for more information on
hardblanks.
2 Smush underscores.
An underscore will be smushed into (and replaced by) any of
``|/\[]{}()<>''.
4 Hierarchy smushing.
Smushes certain characters together according to a hierarchy
containing 6 classes: ``|'', ``/\'', ``[]'', ``{}'', ``()'',
``<>''. A member of any class can be smushed into and
replaced by a member of any later class.
8 Opposite pair smushing, type I.
Smushes opposing brackets (``[]''), braces (``{}'') and
parentheses (``()'') together, replacing them with a
vertical bar (`|').
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16 Opposite pair smushing, type II.
Smushes opposing slashes (``/\'') and greater-than/less-than
(``><'') together, replacing them with an upper-case `X'.
``><'' are only smushed together when they are in that
order, i.e., ``<>'' will not be smushed.
32 Hardblank smushing.
Smushes two hardblanks together, replacing them with a
single hardblank. See FONT FILE FORMAT for more information
on hardblanks.
-v
-I infocode
These options print various information about figlet, then exit.
If several of these options are given on the command line, only
the last is executed, and only after all other command-line
options have been dealt with.
-v prints version and copyright information, as well as a
``Usage: ...'' line. -I prints the information corresponding to
the given infocode in a consistent, reliable (i.e., guaranteed to
be the same in future releases) format. -I is primarily intended
to be used by programs that use figlet. infocode can be any of
the following.
-1 Normal operation (default).
This infocode indicates that figlet should operate normally,
not giving any informational printout, printing its input in
the selected font.
0 Version and copyright.
This is identical to -v.
1 Version (integer).
This will print the version of your copy of figlet as a
decimal integer. The main version number is multiplied by
10000, the sub-version number is multiplied by 100, and the
sub-sub-version number is multiplied by 1. These are added
together, and the result is printed out. For example,
figlet 2.1 will print ``20100''. If there is ever a version
2.1.1, it will print ``20101''. Similarly, version 3.7.2
would print ``30702''. These numbers are guaranteed to be
ascending, with later versions having higher numbers. Note
that the first major release of figlet, version 2.0, did not
have the -I option.
2 Default font directory.
This will print the default font directory. It is affected
by the -d option.
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3 Font.
This will print the name of the font figlet would use. It
is affected by the -f option. This is not a filename; the
``.flf'' suffix is not printed.
4 Output width.
This will print the value figlet would use for outputwidth,
the number of columns wide figlet assumes the screen is. It
is affected by the -w and -t options.
If infocode is any other positive value, figlet will simply exit
without printing anything.
-L
-R
-X These options control whether figlet prints left-to-right or
right-to-left. -L selects left-to-right printing. -R selects
right-to-left printing. -X (default) makes figlet use whichever
is specified in the font file.
EXAMPLES
To use figlet with its default settings, simply type
example% figlet
and then type whatever you like.
To change the font, use the -f option, for example,
example% figlet -f script
Use the -c option if you would prefer centered output:
example% figlet -c
We have found that the most common use of figlet is making up large
text to be placed in e-mail messages. For this reason, figlet
defaults to 80 column output. If you are using a wider terminal, and
would like figlet to use the full width of your terminal, use the -t
option:
example% figlet -t
If you don't want figlet to smush font characters into each other, use
the -m0 option:
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example% figlet -m0
If figlet gets its input from a file, it is often a good idea to use
-p:
example% figlet -p < myfile
Of course, the above can be combined:
example% figlet -ptm0 -f shadow < anotherfile
example% figlet -cf slant
Other Things to Try
On many systems nice effects can be obtained from the lean font by
piping it through tr. Some you might want to try are the following:
example% figlet -f lean | tr ' _/' ' ()'
example% figlet -f lean | tr ' _/' './\\'
example% figlet -f lean | tr ' _/' ' //'
example% figlet -f lean | tr ' _/' '/ '
Similar things can be done with the block font and many of the other
figlet fonts.
FONT FILE FORMAT
If you would like to design a figlet font, it is usually best to begin
with an already-existing font. Except for the first line of a font
file, most of the file format should be obvious. If you design a
font, please let us know about it! (See AUTHORS for e-mail
addresses.)
A figlet font filename must have the suffix ``.flf''.
A figlet font file begins with a header. The header consists of one
line giving information about the font, followed by zero or more
comment lines, which figlet ignores. Following the header is the font
data.
The Header
The first line of a figlet font file is of the following form:
flf2ahardblank height up_ht maxlen smushmode cmt_count rtol
where hardblank is a character, and the remaining values are integers,
for example:
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flf2a$ 6 5 20 15 3 0
The last value, rtol, may be omitted, in which case it is assumed to
be 0.
flf2a$ 6 5 20 15 3
For those desiring a quick explanation, the above line indicates that
this font has characters which are 6 lines tall, 5 of which are above
the baseline, no line in the font data is more than 20 characters
long, the default smushmode is 15 (kern and smush in various ways),
there are 3 comment lines, and this font is to be printed left-to-
right. More in-depth explanations follow.
The first five characters of a font file should be ``flf2a''.
``flf2'' is the magic number of a figlet 2 font file. The next
character (`a') is currently ignored. It may mean something in future
versions of figlet. If it does, you can be sure your fonts will still
work if this character is `a'.
Immediately following this is the hardblank (character). Note that
there are no blanks between ``flf2a'' and the hardblank. figlet can
smush together consecutive characters in various ways. Normally, any
character can be smushed into a blank. A hardblank prints as a blank,
but cannot be smushed into any character except a blank, and, if
smushmode 32 is enabled, another hardblank. (For example, the `r' in
script.flf contains a hardblank, `$' in that font. To see why this is
necessary, create a copy of script.flf with this hardblank replaced by
a blank. In this new font, the ``tr'' combination looks awful.)
By convention, the hardblank is a `$', but it can be any character
besides blank, newline and null. If you want the entire printing
ASCII set available to use, make the hardblank a <delete> character.
Then comes the height (integer). This is the number of screen lines
high that each character in the font is.
up_ht (integer) is the number of lines from the baseline of a
character to the top of the character, i.e., it is the height of a
character, ignoring any descenders. This number is currently ignored
by figlet, but future versions may use it.
maxlen (integer) is the maximum length of a line in the font file
(excluding the first line and the comments lines, which can be as long
as you want). You may want to make this a little too large as a
safety measure.
smushmode (integer) determines how much figlet smushes the font.
Possible smushmodes are -1 through 63. Typically, you'll want to use
0 (kern font characters without smushing them together), -1 (no
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kerning or smushing) or 15 (smush various pairs of characters together
into single characters). To try out different smushmodes with your
font, use the -m command-line option. See OPTIONS for a more detailed
explanation of these smushmodes. (Note that a smushmode of -2 can be
given on the command line, but not in a font file.)
Between the first line and the actual characters of the font are the
comment lines. Cmt_count specifies how many lines there are. These
lines are optional, may be as long as you want, and are ignored by
figlet.
rtol (integer) tells which direction the font is to be printed. 0
means left-to-right, and 1 means right-to-left. Left-to-right text is
printed flush-left by default, while right-to-left text is printed
flush-right by default. rtol may be omitted, in which case 0 (left-
to-right) is assumed. Earlier versions of figlet (i.e., version 2.0)
ignore rtol.
Thus, a complete figlet font file header will look something like the
following:
flf2a$ 6 5 20 15 3
Example by Glenn Chappell <ggc@uiuc.edu> 8/94
Permission is hereby given to modify this font, as long as the
modifier's name is placed on a comment line.
The Font Data
The font data begins on the next line after the comments and continues
to the end of the file. The characters from ` ' to `~' are given in
standard ASCII order, followed by the extra German characters:
umlauted `A', `O', `U', `a', `o' and `u' and s-z. Following these are
the optional code-tagged characters. Each character uses height
lines, where height was given on the first line of the font file.
Each code-tagged character is preceeded by an extra line with the
character's code (a number) on it. The characters in the file are
given exactly as they should be printed out, with two exceptions: (1)
hardblanks should be the hardblank character, not a blank, and (2)
every line has an endmark character.
In most figlet fonts, the endmark is either `@' or '#'. figlet
eliminates the last block of consecutive equal characters from each
line (other than the header lines) when the file is read in. By
convention, the last line of a font character has 2 endmarks, while
all the rest have one. This makes it easy to see where characters
begin and end. No line should have more than 2 endmarks.
The code-tagged characters are optional, and are ignored by earier
versions of figlet (i.e., version 2.0). The code-tagged characters
begin just after the German characters. There can be as many or as
few of these as you like. The first line of a code-tagged character
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has a single number on it, the character's code, which is the number
by which figlet will refer to it. This number can be in decimal,
octal or hexadecimal, using the standard scanf conventions for such
numbers. On the next line the character itself begins, in the same
format as the un-tagged characters.
If two or more font characters have the same tag, the last one in the
font is the one used. For this purpose, the normal ASCII characters
are considered to have tags equal to their ASCII value, while the
German characters are given tags -255 through -249.
There is no required encoding for the code-tagged characters. figlet
simply prints the character with the given code when it is told to.
However, in most of the fonts, we have used ISO Latin-1 for characters
160-255, following a suggestion of Zhahai Stewart. Stewart has
suggested using Unicode for other characters.
The zero tag is treated specially. It is figlet's ``missing
character''. Whenever figlet is told to print a character which
doesn't exist in the current font, it will print character zero. If
character zero doesn't exist, nothing will be printed.
Notes
It is very important that every character in a font has the same
height, and, once the endmarks are removed, that all the lines
constituting a single font character have the same length. Be careful
also that no lines in the font file have trailing blanks, as figlet
will take these to be the endmarks. Many problems like these can be
found easily using chkfont, part of the standard figlet package, and
also available, as of this writing, by anonymous FTP from
ftp.nicoh.com:pub/figlet/util.
If you don't want to define all the characters, make the undefined
characters empty, i.e., each line of the character should consist only
of one or two endmarks.
The blank character should usually be made entirely of hardblanks.
(Most slanted fonts are an exception to this.)
If you design a font, it is helpful if you put your name and an e-mail
address on a comment line. If you will allow others to modify your
font, you may want to say so on a comment line.
If a font contains a non-Roman alphabet stored in locations normally
taken by ASCII, we have found it helpful to include a ``translation''
table as one of the characters of the font. Typically, the ``~''
character contains a list of all the special characters in the font,
along with the ASCII characters they correspond to. It is a good idea
to keep this table no more than 79 columns wide. (Thanks to Gedaliah
Friedenberg for this idea.)
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Again, if you design a font, please let us know!
CONTROLFILE FORMAT
(Note: This section isn't terribly well-written. I really don't have
time right now to do much with it. If you want to write a
controlfile, just look at the existing files and ignore the f command,
and you'll probably do pretty well. Anyone needing extra help can
write us at <figlet@uiuc.edu>. Also, anyone willing to revise this
section or the FONT FILE FORMAT section is welcome to do so. Please
let us know about your efforts if you give it a try. -GGC-)
Controlfiles are files containing lists of commands that figlet
executes each time it reads a character. A controlfile is specified
to figlet using the -C command line option (see OPTIONS). In the file
itself the first line identifies the file as a figlet controlfile, and
the remaining lines are the commands, one per line. Currently, the
only recognized commands tell figlet to translate one character to
another (similar to the Unix tr command). In future versions of
figlet, more commands may be added. As with font files, when writing
a controlfile, it is usually best to begin with an existing file.
The filename of a figlet controlfile must have the suffix ``.flc''.
The first five characters of a controlfile should be ``flc2a''.
``flc2'' is the magic number of a figlet controlfile. The next
character (`a') is currently ignored. It may mean something in future
versions of figlet. If it does, you can be sure your files will still
work if this character is `a'.
Each of the following lines of the file consists of a one-character
command followed by whatever parameters the command requires,
excepting blank lines, which are ignored. There are currently three
recognized commands: #, t and f.
# comment
Any line beginning with # is ignored.
t translate
This is similar to the Unix tr command. It directs figlet to
``translate'' one character to another. ``t'' is followed by one
or more blanks, then by a character (or range of characters,
e.g., ``A-Z'') then one or more blanks, then another character
(or range).
For example,
t # $
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will convert `#' to `$', while
t A-Z a-z
will convert upper-case ASCII to lower-case ASCII. A range
should always be followed by another range of the same size.
A number of backslash (`\') options are available for specifying
characters. Any of the standard ``C'' language backslash-
character conventions are legal, e.g., ``\n'' for newline, etc.
Also, backslash-blank can be used to specify a blank character.
Backslash followed by a number in any of the standard scanf
formats (decimal, octal or hexadecimal) specifies the character
with the given code. For example,
t \n-\ \65-W
will convert all characters from newline to blank into the
corresponding characters from `A' to `W' (`A' has code 65).
If a number of consecutive t commands are given, then for each
character input, only the first applicable command, if any, will
be executed. As a result,
t A B
t B A
will swap the characters `A' and `B'. If figlet reads an `A' the
first command will change `A' to `B', in which case the second
will not be executed. In the following list,
t A B
t A C
the second command is never executed. In short, a sequence of t
commands ``does what it ought to''.
f freeze
More complex files, in which a single character is acted upon by
several t commands, can be set up using the f command. f
``freezes'' the current character, executing the remaining
commands in the controlfile as if they were in a separate file.
The f command has no parameters, and anything following it on the
same line is ignored. (Note: If you, along with so many others,
cannot figure out what the f command does, or why anyone would
use it, feel free to ignore it.) After figlet executes a t
command, it skips to the end of the file or to the next f
command. If any t commands follow, the first applicable one will
be executed. The result is that f acts as a ``freeze'',
executing the remaining commands as if they were in a separate
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file.
FILES
file.flf figlet font file
file.flc figlet control file
DIAGNOSTICS
figlet's diagnostics are intended to be self-explanatory. Possible
messages are
Usage: ...
Out of memory
Unable to open font file
Not a figlet 2 font file
Unable to open control file
Not a figlet 2 control file
"-t" is disabled, since ioctl is not fully implemented.
This last message is printed when the -t option is given, but the
operating system in use does not include the system call figlet uses
to determine the terminal width.
figlet also prints an explanatory message if the -F option is given on
the command line. The earlier version of figlet, version 2.0, listed
the available fonts when the -F option was given. This option has
been removed from figlet 2.1. It has been replaced by the figlist
script, which is part of the standard figlet package.
ORIGIN
``figlet'' stands for ``Frank, Ian and Glenn's LETters''. Inspired by
Frank's .sig, Glenn wrote (most of) it, and Ian helped.
Most of the standard figlet fonts were inspired by signatures on
various UseNet articles. Since typically hundreds of people use the
same style of letters in their signatures, it was often not deemed
necessary to give credit to any one font designer.
BUGS
Very little error checking is done on font and control files. While
figlet tries to be forgiving of errors, and should (hopefully) never
actually crash, using an improperly-formatted file with figlet will
produce unpredictable output.
figlet does not handle formatting characters in a very intelligent
way. A tab character is converted to a blank, and vertical-tab,
form-feed and carriage-return are each converted to a newline. On
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many systems, tabs can be handled better by piping files through
expand before piping through figlet.
figlet output is quite ugly if it is displayed in a proportionally-
spaced font. I suppose this is to be expected.
AUTHORS
Glenn Chappell <ggc@uiuc.edu> did most of the work. You can e-mail him
but he is not an e-mail fanatic; people who e-mail Glenn will probably
get answers, but if you e-mail his best friend:
Ian Chai <spectre@uiuc.edu>, who is an e-mail fanatic, you'll get
answers, endless conversation about the mysteries of life, invitations
to join some 473 mailing lists and a free toaster. (Well, ok, maybe
not the free toaster.)
Frank inspired this whole project with his .sig, but don't e-mail him;
he's decidedly an un-e-mail-fanatic.
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