Filed under: Terminal Tips
Terminal Tip: Create a text banner
Want to create a "Happy Birthday" or "Congratulations" banner? Want to skip all the "how do I get a large font to print sideways?" stuff? The command line "banner" command may help. It allows you to create a sideways message that you can open in TextEdit, print out and (with a bit of help from scissors and scotch tape) hang from the rafters. The banner command defaults to an old style text width of 132 characters, so you'll want to tell it to keep that width down to 72 or 75 if you're going to use TextEdit's default font. (You can always play with the font sizes in TextEdit and the width in the banner command if you want.) Use the -w flag to set the width and put the text you want to bannerize in a string. The bit about "open -f" pipes the results into TextEdit.
banner -w 72 "Happy 75th Birthday" | open -f
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
