I spent a bit of time (probably too little) one afternoon this week searching for a website that created ascii versions of text. Instead, I found a command line utility called FIGlet, and approximately 4 hours of dev time later, (including 3 hours after about 11:30pm last night), BigText.org was born onto the internets.
Feedback is welcome/desired. I’m especially curious whether anyone can break it, as obviously security is a concern.
UPDATE: There are many other web-based figlet servers out there. I’m glad I didn’t notice them until now. I probably would have given up.
That didn’t go as well as planned. :)
yeah, I think WP might strip out whitespace from your comments or something. Oddly enough, it looked ok in my email client, so I got the message. :)
I added a <pre> wrapper, and put the line breaks back in, and now it looks ok. ;) Not my favorite font, but it works. This copy/paste madness is exactly why I added the “permalink” feature.
The font choice was intentional. I knew that I probably couldn’t wrap my comment in tags. The periods in that font help keep the line breaks from happening where they don’t belong. They can also sometimes help keep a short word readable even when not used with a terminal font. Anyway… it looked great before I hit the submit button. :)