خَطّ — Khatt

Render Arabic text as ASCII/Unicode-block art — the Arabic FIGlet that FIGlet can't be.

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(that's «خط» — "khatt", meaning line/script/calligraphy — Amiri font, braille style)

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(«ايه الأخبار» — "What's the news?" — Cairo font, ascii style)

Why FIGlet can't do this

FIGlet fonts map one character to one fixed glyph. Arabic doesn't work that way:

• Every letter has up to four positional forms (isolated / initial / medial / final).
• Some letter pairs form mandatory ligatures — ل + ا must become لا.
• The script is cursive: letters connect, and the connections carry the word's shape.
• Text runs right-to-left, and real text mixes RTL words with LTR numbers and names.

Khatt sidesteps glyph tables entirely with a rasterize-then-map pipeline:

text ──► HarfBuzz shaping ──► FreeType rasterization ──► density mapping ──► art
         (positional forms,    (real Arabic fonts,        (blocks / ascii /
          ligatures, bidi)      hi-res grayscale)          braille ramps)

The result is genuine calligraphic letterforms — from real fonts — approximated in terminal characters.

Install

pip install khatt        # or: uv add khatt

From source:

git clone https://github.com/DrEssam97/khatt.git && cd khatt
uv sync

Quickstart

Python API

import khatt

print(khatt.render("مرحبا"))                          # blocks style, size 10
print(khatt.render("خط", style="braille", size=16))   # bigger, high effective resolution
print(khatt.render("القاهرة", font="cairo", style="ascii", threshold=0.4))
print(khatt.render("السلام عليكم ورحمة الله", width=60))  # wraps at 60 columns
print(khatt.render("مرحبا\nKhatt 2026", font="rubik"))    # one art line per text line

art = khatt.render("مرحبا", style="braille")
khatt.art_to_image(art, fg="white", bg="#1e1e2e").save("art.png")  # the art as a picture

image = khatt.render_image("مرحبا\nKhatt 2026")  # the plain text: Pillow image, black on white
image.save("khatt.png")

khatt.list_fonts()   # ['amiri', 'cairo', 'noto-naskh', 'rubik']
khatt.list_styles()  # ['ascii', 'blocks', 'braille']

CLI

khatt "مرحبا"                          # render to the terminal
khatt "خط" --style braille --size 16
khatt "القاهرة" -f cairo -s ascii -t 0.4
echo "سلام" | khatt                    # stdin
printf 'سطر أول\nسطر ثاني' | khatt     # multi-line input
khatt "خط" --output art.txt            # save the art
khatt "خط" -s braille -o art.png       # save the art as an image
khatt "خط" -s ascii -o art.png --fg "#e5e5e5" --bg "#1e1e2e"   # terminal colours
khatt "خط" -o logo.png --bg none       # transparent background
khatt "خط" -o khatt.png --png text     # the plain high-resolution text instead
khatt --list-fonts
khatt --list-styles

Arabic diacritics (tashkeel) are stripped from text art by default — they're illegible at character-grid resolution. Pass --keep-tashkeel (API: render(..., keep_tashkeel=True)) to render them. Plain-text images (--png text, render_image) keep them by default, since they have the resolution to show them: pass --strip-tashkeel (API: render_image(..., keep_tashkeel=False)) to remove them.

In art images, braille dots and shade blocks are drawn as shapes, so they stay crisp at any size; ascii characters are drawn in a bold sans font. Each character gets a cell twice as tall as it is wide (12 × 24 px by default; API: cell_width=), matching the terminal the art was sized for.

Sizing and wrapping

Like FIGlet, letters have a fixed size and long text wraps:

• size (--size) is the font size in character rows per em (default 10). It gives the same on-screen height in every style; braille just packs 4× the dots into it.
• width (--width) is the maximum width. Lines wrap at spaces; a single word that can't fit on its own shrinks the whole render until it does. The CLI defaults to your terminal's width, the API to 80 columns; width=None turns wrapping off.
• Line breaks in the input start new lines. Right-to-left paragraphs are right-aligned, left-to-right ones left-aligned.
• --fit (API: size=None) is the 0.1.0 behaviour: scale each line to fill exactly width columns, without wrapping.

Gradio app

uv sync --extra app
uv run python app.py

Bundled fonts and styles

All fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, preserved verbatim in khatt/fonts/LICENSES/.

Deploy the app to a Hugging Face Space

app.py follows the Spaces convention (single file at the repo root), so the whole repository deploys unchanged with one command:

uv run --extra app gradio deploy