ASCII Art Text

This is the most useless-useful node in ComfyUI-FairLab. Feed it a string and it hands back a three-line banner built out of block characters - think ▒█▀▀█ ▒█░▒█ ▒█▄▄█ style lettering - printing the result to the console and returning it as a string you can route anywhere. It's not going to improve your renders. It will make your workflow's terminal output and any debug note look dramatically cooler.

The mechanism is about as simple as it gets, and it's worth knowing because the README lies about it. The node lowercases your input, keeps only alphabetic characters (c.isalpha()), looks up each letter in a hardcoded dictionary of 26 three-row glyphs defined right in the source, and joins them side by side with spaces. There's no font rendering involved at all.

That last part is the interesting bit. The README's technical notes say ASCII Art Text "requires system font support" and suggests installing fonts-dejavu-core on a minimal Linux box. Open the source and you'll see that's stale - every glyph for A through Z is a hardcoded block-character string, so there's no font lookup anywhere. If you're on a headless server and worried about this node failing for lack of fonts, don't be. This is a nice reminder that READMEs rot and the shipped code is the real contract.

The single input is:

• string - whatever text you want as a banner.

The single output is:

• string - the rendered banner, with newlines between the three rows.

A few quirks from reading the source, so you're not surprised: spaces, digits, and punctuation are silently dropped, because only alphabetic characters survive the filter. "Hello World!" becomes a banner of HELLOWORLD run together. Letters that aren't in the hardcoded A–Z map are skipped silently too. And it prints the banner to the console as a side effect - which, honestly, is half the fun and probably why OUTPUT_NODE is set.

Where would you actually use it? Console diagnostics are the main legit answer: label a step in a batch run so your terminal scroll is readable, or drop a banner into a "workflow title" string you display. Beyond that, treat it as a toy - which is fine. The pack ships 58 utility nodes and not all of them need to justify their existence.

Installation is the standard FairLab path: ComfyUI Manager → Install Custom Nodes → search ComfyUI-FairLab → install → restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/yanhuifair/ComfyUI-FairLab.git
cd ComfyUI-FairLab
pip install -r requirements.txt

Search "ASCII Art Text" or "ascii art" after restart. No models, no weights, no heavy dependencies - the whole node is a string dict and a list comprehension. If it doesn't appear after restart, the console import error will tell you the pack failed to load, which is a pack-level problem, not this node's.