I've used a lot of different UN*X systems, and all of them, as far as I can 
tell, seem to provide a "banner" program that prints some short string in 
large letters.  Except Linux.  I can't seem to find something like that 
anywhere (well, there is /usr/games/banner, but that's different than a 
typical banner implementation).  So, since it's such a simplistic thing 
to do, I wrote it myself.

The 'banner' program prints a "banner" on the screen that corresponds to the 
first X characters of a string entered on the command line. 

Say you'd like to print "KEN" in big letters.  Use:

   banner ken

and you'll get back:

   #    #  #######  #     #
   #   #   #        ##    #
   #  #    #        # #   #
   ###     #####    #  #  #
   #  #    #        #   # #
   #   #   #        #    ##
   #    #  #######  #     #

It's pretty configurable.  The letter definitions can be changed by changing 
the array definitions in "letters.h".  The defined letter height, the number 
of spaces after each letter, the max letters of a given string that will be 
printed, etc. are all controlled from in there.  The only real restriction is 
that all of the letters have to be the same height.  Note, however, that there 
is no facility for printing lower-case letters - as far as I can remember, 
Solaris and AIX don't have that, and I didn't feel like putting it in.  Adding 
it would be easy, if you want to come up with letter definitions for the 
lower-case letters.

Yeah, yeah, this IS a pretty simple program, and it doesn't really need a GNU 
autoconf setup and all that stuff - it's just ANSI C.  This just gave me an 
excuse to learn autoconf... ;-)

KJP 06/11/2000
 
