pyfiglet

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Synopsis

pyfiglet is a full port of FIGlet (http://www.figlet.org/) into pure python. It takes ASCII text and renders it in ASCII art fonts (like the title above, which is the 'block' font).

FAQ

• Q: Why? WHY?!!

  A: I [cjones] was bored. Really bored.

• Q: What the hell does this do that FIGlet doesn't?

  A: Not much, except allow your font collection to live in one big zipfile. The point of this code is to embed dynamic figlet rendering in Python without having to execute an external program, although it operates on the commandline as well. See below for USAGE details. You can think of this as a python FIGlet driver.

• Q: Does this support kerning/smushing like FIGlet?

  A: Yes, yes it does. Output should be identical to FIGlet. If not, this is a bug, which you should report to me!

• Q: Can I use/modify/redstribute this code?

  A: Yes, under the terms of the MIT (see LICENSE below).

• Q: I improved this code, what should I do with it?

  A: You can submit changes to https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/pulls. If you make changes to the kerning/mushing/rendering portion, PLEASE test it thoroughly. The code is fragile and complex.

• Q: Where did my font go?

  A: It turns out that we didn't have distribution rights for some of the fonts and so we had to remove them. Full details of the change and why we did it are in https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/59.

• Q: Where can I find these and other fonts?

  A: Do a quick search for "figlet fonts" on your favourite search engine should give you what you need. However, if you are looking for the specific removed fonts, please go to http://www.jave.de/figlet/fonts.html.

• Q: Why are some fonts missing in distribution?

  A: Some Linux distributions have very strict legal restrictions on what contributions they will take. For these systems, we have divided the fonts into ones that have a clear redistribution license and those that don't. These are the fonts-standard and fonts-contrib directories in this repository.

• Q: What about those other fonts?

  A: While there isn't a watertight case for the license, we believe that any legal constraint for these fonts has long expired and so they are public domain, so are continuing to redistribute via pypi. If an owner of any of these fonts wants us to stop, please just raise an issue on https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues proving your ownership and we will remove the requested fonts.

Usage

You can use pyfiglet in one of two ways. First, it operates on the commandline as C figlet does and supports most of the same options. Run with --help to see a full list of tweaks. Mostly you will only use -f to change the font. It defaults to standard.flf.

tools/pyfiglet 'text to render'

Pyfiglet is also a library that can be used in python code:

from pyfiglet import Figlet
f = Figlet(font='slant')
print(f.renderText('text to render'))

or

import pyfiglet
f = pyfiglet.figlet_format("text to render", font="slant")
print(f)

If you have found some new fonts that you want to use, you can use the command line interface to install your font file as follows:

pyfiglet -L <font file>

The font file can be a ZIP file of lots of fonts or just a single font. Depending on how you installed pyfiglet, you may find that you need root access to install the font - e.g. sudo pyfiglet -L <font file>.

Author

All of the documentation and the majority of the work done was by Christopher Jones (cjones@insub.org) and many other contributors. Packaged by Peter Waller (p@pwaller.net), various enhancements by Stefano Rivera (stefano@rivera.za.net), and lots of help from many contributors!

Thank you all for your efforts, please send a pull request to add yourself to this list if you would like to take credit.

(In the words of the original author) pyfiglet is a port of FIGlet, and much of the code is directly translated from the C source. I optimized some bits where I could, but because the smushing and kerning code is so incredibly complex, it was safer and easier to port the logic almost exactly. Therefore, I can't really take much credit for authorship, just translation. The original authors of FIGlet are listed on their website at http://www.figlet.org/.

The Python port was done by Christopher Jones cjones@insub.org (http://gruntle.org/).

It is currently maintained by Peter Waller (p@pwaller.net, github:pwaller)

The toilet fonts (.tlf) were imported from toilet 0.3-1, by Sam Hocevar (sam@zoy.org).

Thanks

Lots of people have helped make pyfiglet what it is but I particularly want to call out.

github:stefanor for various bug fixes and improvements and the debian packaging. github:peterbrittain for helping to close lots of issues.

License

The MIT License (MIT) Copyright © 2007-2023

Christopher Jones <cjones@insub.org>
Stefano Rivera <stefano@rivera.za.net>
Peter Waller <p@pwaller.net>
And various contributors (see git history).

(see LICENSE for full details)

Packaging status