ASCII Fonts
Before fonts were files with outlines, they were text: banner alphabets stored as rows of characters, drawn by terminals one cell at a time. This wing is the working archive of that world, the collections behind the ASCII generator, cataloged design by design and shown as real specimens.
Three collections live here. The FIGlet library holds 313 banner designs, most of them carrying their author's name in the file's own header comments. The TheDraw shelf holds the 34 fonts recovered from the BBS art-pack archive, ten of them restored in-house as TrueType fonts. And the packs shelf is the archive itself: 4,019 scene packs, opened and inventoried, 66,816 .ans artworks inside. Nothing here is a download: font.lol showcases these designs for reference, and the live ones are usable in the generator.
The shelves
Start with these four
Three collections, three formats
FIGlet, from 1991
FIGlet dates to 1991 and turned banner-making into a data format: a .flf file is a short header, a block of comments, and 95 glyphs drawn as rows of ordinary characters. Thousands of people wrote them, and most signed their work in the comments, which is why this shelf can credit 242 of its 313 designs from the files themselves. Its descendant TOIlet added color and block characters; the library holds 24 TOIlet designs too, cataloged from their headers.
TheDraw and the packs
The BBS scene drew with TheDraw, an ANSI editor whose font files (.TDF) store letters as grids of code page 437 cells, color fonts carrying a color on every cell. The fonts traveled inside monthly art packs, the ZIP releases of groups like ACiD and iCE. When font.lol inventoried its 4,019-pack archive, TheDraw fonts turned up in only six packs at the top level: fonts moved in dedicated font packs, not inside ordinary art packs. A recursive pass that opened the archives inside the archives found 15 more designs nested in six further packs, traveling as cargo inside bigger zips.
Specimen fonts
The third kind never became a file format at all: a whole .ans artwork that simply IS the font, a sheet of letterforms other artists copied by eye. The census flagged 41 candidate files in 39 packs at any depth, names like SS-FONT and KR-FONTS. They are cataloged on the packs shelf as candidates; confirming one means segmenting its sheet, work that has not been done yet.