view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

doc/figfont.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

A FIGure (thusly capitalized) is an image created by a FIGdriver.


"FIG"

A bit of history:

In Spring 1991, inspired by the Email signature of a friend named Frank, and
goaded on by Ian Chai, Glenn Chappell wrote a nifty little 170-line "C"
program called "newban", which would create large letters out of ordinary
text characters.  At the time, it was only compiled for UNIX.  In hindsight,
we now call it "FIGlet 1.0".  FIGlet stands for <F>rank, <I>an, and <G>lenn's
<let>ters.  In various incarnations, newban circulated around the net for a
couple of years.  It had one font, which included only lowercase letters.

In early 1993, Ian decided newban was due for a few changes, so together Ian
and Glenn added the full ASCII character set, to start with.  First, though,
Ian had to find a copy of the source, since Glenn had tossed it away as not
worth the disk space.  Ian and Glenn discussed what could be done with it,
decided on a general re-write, and, 7 months later, ended up with 888 lines
of code, 13 FIGfonts and documentation.  This was FIGlet 2.0, the first real