How to easily print ascii-art text? [closed]

I have a program that dumps a lot of output, and I want some of that output to really stand out. One way could be to render important text with ascii art, like this web service does for example:

 # # ## ##### # # # # # #### # # # # # # ## # # ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## # ###### ##### # # # # # # # # ### ## ## # # # # # ## # # ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # ####

other solutions could be colored or bold output. So how to do this sort of stuff easily in Python?

3 Answers

pyfiglet - pure Python implementation of
```
pip install pyfiglet
```
termcolor - helper functions for ANSI color formatting
```
pip install termcolor
```
colorama - multiplatform support (Windows)
```
pip install colorama
```

import sys
from colorama import init
init(strip=not sys.stdout.isatty()) # strip colors if stdout is redirected
from termcolor import cprint
from pyfiglet import figlet_format
cprint(figlet_format('missile!', font='starwars'), 'yellow', 'on_red', attrs=['bold'])

Example

$ python print-warning.py

missile

$ python print-warning.py | cat
.___ ___. __ _______. _______. __ __ _______ __
| \/ | | | / | / || | | | | ____|| |
| \ / | | | | (----` | (----`| | | | | |__ | |
| |\/| | | | \ \ \ \ | | | | | __| | |
| | | | | | .----) | .----) | | | | `----.| |____ |__|
|__| |__| |__| |_______/ |_______/ |__| |_______||_______|(__)

PIL gives a cool way to do this very simple. You can render the text onto a b/w image and convert that bitmap to a string stream replacing the black and white pixels to chars.

from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
ShowText = 'Python PIL'
font = ImageFont.truetype('arialbd.ttf', 15) #load the font
size = font.getsize(ShowText) #calc the size of text in pixels
image = Image.new('1', size, 1) #create a b/w image
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.text((0, 0), ShowText, font=font) #render the text to the bitmap
for rownum in range(size[1]):
#scan the bitmap:
# print ' ' for black pixel and
# print '#' for white one line = [] for colnum in range(size[0]): if image.getpixel((colnum, rownum)): line.append(' '), else: line.append('#'), print ''.join(line)

It renders the next result:

 ####### ## ####### ## ## ## ### ## ## ## ### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### ###### #### ###### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ### ## ### ## ## ## ### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ###### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ###### ## ## ## ## # ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ### ## ## #### ## ## ## ## ######## ## ## ### ## ###

I made a little more comprehensive example with functional style.

import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
ShowText = 'Python PIL'
font = ImageFont.truetype('arialbd.ttf', 15) #load the font
size = font.getsize(ShowText) #calc the size of text in pixels
image = Image.new('1', size, 1) #create a b/w image
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.text((0, 0), ShowText, font=font) #render the text to the bitmap
def mapBitToChar(im, col, row): if im.getpixel((col, row)): return ' ' else: return '#'
for r in range(size[1]): print ''.join([mapBitToChar(image, c, r) for c in range(size[0])])

This is fun. I've figured out how to use PIL (the "Pillow" fork, of course) and Numpy to do this fully "vectorized", i.e. without loops:

text = "Hi there"
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
import numpy as np
myfont = ImageFont.truetype("verdanab.ttf", 12)
size = myfont.getsize(text)
img = Image.new("1",size,"black")
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
draw.text((0, 0), text, "white", font=myfont)
pixels = np.array(img, dtype=np.uint8)
chars = np.array([' ','#'], dtype="U1")[pixels]
strings = chars.view('U' + str(chars.shape[1])).flatten()
print( "\n".join(strings))

 ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### ##### #### ## ## #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ######## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ###### ## ###### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## # ## ## # ## ## ## ### ## ## #### ## ####