{"id":3942,"date":"2026-11-03T15:22:15","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T19:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/?p=3942"},"modified":"2026-11-03T15:22:34","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T19:22:34","slug":"recursive-figlet-fonts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/03\/recursive-figlet-fonts\/","title":{"rendered":"Recursive FIGlet Fonts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A couple of weeks ago I was messing around and accidentally pasted the output of my <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/software\/taag\/\">Text to ASCII Art Generator<\/a> into its input box while using the font <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/software\/taag\/#p=display&amp;f=Future\">Future<\/a>. I was initially very confused because what was in front of me didn&#8217;t appear to be the Future font. It appeared to be some larger font, but then I realized it was Future, it was just Future processing Future. I had pasted in the wrong text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I thought it was a cool effect and poked around to see if any other fonts could process their output in a legible way. Eventually I found the <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/software\/taag\/#p=display&amp;f=Letter\">Letter<\/a> font, which had a neat recursive property to it. Theoretically one could keep cycling the output back as input as create an infinite fractal-like design. I thought this was a neat enough idea to do a short video on (below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"FIGlet Inception: ASCII made of ASCII\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/f42zQJXagT8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I discuss how it works in the video, as well as link to a few examples in the description. One issue a couple commenters have brought up is how dark the video is. There are unfortunately a couple of things working against me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The letters get dimmer the more they&#8217;re broken down into sub-characters. This can really be seen in the &#8220;Hello&#8221; examples where I show the text at different levels. In the 4th level the text starts to almost become invisible.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>For the animation, the brightness of the characters had to be adjusted so they didn&#8217;t flash\/dim when they went from being rendered as a character to being rendered as a character made of characters. So they could never be rendered at full brightness. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway, check it out if you have a few minutes, and if you like the video be sure to give it a like!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago I was messing around and accidentally pasted the output of my Text to ASCII Art Generator into its input box while using the font Future. I was initially very confused because what was in front of me didn&#8217;t appear to be the Future font. It appeared to be some larger &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/03\/recursive-figlet-fonts\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Recursive FIGlet Fonts<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3943,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3942\/revisions\/3943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}