readme-ascii turns a line of ASCII text into a crisp PNG banner—perfect for GitHub READMEs where raw ASCII often wraps awkwardly.
| Pain point | What readme-ascii gives you |
|---|---|
| Raw ASCII breaks on small screens | Generates a PNG that scales smoothly |
| Designing a custom logo takes time | Instant banner: type ➜ generate ➜ download |
| SVGs sometimes get stripped by GitHub | PNG sidesteps sanitization and privacy warnings |
- Open the hosted demo, or your fork's GitHub Pages URL.
- Enter your text in the sidebar. The preview updates live as you type.
- Tweak font, text color, background color, transparency, and shadow.
- Click Compare fonts to see the same text rendered across every available font; click a card to promote it into an inline theater preview and select that font.
- Click Download to save the PNG.
Runtime is a pure static site (no build step). The dev toolchain is Node-only:
npm install
npm start # serves the site at http://localhost:8123/(npm start runs serve. You can also open index.html directly, but some browsers restrict figlet's font fetch under file://.)
End-to-end tests cover the live preview, compare grid, and theater focus panel. They use Playwright and start their own static server on port 8124:
npx playwright install chromium # one-time browser download
npm test # headless
npm run test:headed # watch in a browser windowGitHub Pages serves the repo root directly. No build step, no separate branch, no CI. Enable it once in repo settings:
Settings ➜ Pages ➜ Build and deployment ➜ Source: Deploy from a branch ➜ Branch:
master/(root)
Every push to master republishes the site at https://<user>.github.io/readme-ascii/ within ~30 seconds.
The hosted site reports to a GA4 property owned by @ajmeese7. To wire up your own analytics, follow docs/GA4_SETUP.md.