Big Text Sign

A big text sign turns whatever screen you have to hand into a sign: a phone held up at airport arrivals with a name on it, a tablet on the front desk with the Wi-Fi password, a laptop in the window saying OPEN, a TV at a party saying where the coats go. Type the message, press Show sign, and the words fill the screen at the largest size that fits. Nothing is installed and nothing is sent anywhere: the sign is drawn by your own browser, and it works offline once the page has loaded.

How the text is fitted

Every line you type stays one line on the sign — nothing wraps. The page then tries font sizes and measures the result, halving the gap between "fits" and "too big" each time, until it lands on the largest size at which every line fits across the screen and all the lines fit down it. Because lines never wrap, one long line makes the whole sign smaller: that is deliberate, since a sign that broke a name or a phone number across two lines in a place you did not choose would be harder to read than a slightly smaller one. Put a line break where you want the words to split.

Some letters draw outside the box the font gives them — the tail of an italic f, the overhang of a wide capital. The page measures how far each line's ink actually reaches and leaves that much room at the edges, so the first and last letters are never clipped. Turn a phone on its side, resize the window or put the sign on a bigger screen and it refits straight away.

Formatting

• # Heading at the start of a line makes it twice the size of the rest.
• ## Heading makes it one and a half times the size.
• **bold** and *italic* work anywhere in a line, and ***both*** together.
• A backslash makes the next character plain, so \* shows an asterisk and \# at the start of a line shows a hash sign rather than a heading.
• A blank line is kept as a gap, which is the easy way to separate a title from its details.

Colours default to your light or dark theme. Turn off Theme under either colour to pick your own — yellow on black reads from furthest away, and white on a deep colour looks least like a screen. The margin keeps a share of each side clear, as a percentage, which helps on a TV that crops the picture edges.

Slides, countdowns and motion

Put || between two parts of the message and the sign shows them one after the other, each for the number of seconds you set (five unless you change it), then starts again. Each slide is fitted on its own, so a short slide is not held to the size of a long one. To show two bars as text rather than split there, write \|\|.

Write {countdown} anywhere in a slide and it shows the time left, as 1d 02:03:04, 2:03:04 or 3:04 — units that have run out are dropped from the front. Count down to a date and time (your own time zone, unless the link names another) or for a length such as 1h30m, which starts when the sign opens. When it reaches zero it stays at 0:00, or, if you fill in At zero, show, that text replaces the slide — "Doors open!" in place of "Doors open in 3:04".

There are two animations. Pulse swells the text gently and back; the sign is fitted a little smaller so the swell never touches the edges. Scroll across runs the message across the screen like a news ticker, sized to the screen's height, so a long line stays big instead of shrinking to fit. If your device is set to reduce motion, neither moves: the sign is shown still and fitted as usual.

The link is the sign

Everything about a sign lives in the address after the #, and you can read it and change it by hand. The message comes first, then any settings that are not at their default:

/tools/big-text#Hello%0AWorld&bg=000000&fg=ffff00

%0A is a line break and %20 a space. bg and fg take six hex digits or auto, and pad takes a margin from 0 to 40. interval is the seconds per slide; until takes a date like 2026-12-25T18:00 and timer a length like 1h30m; zero is the text shown at zero; anim is pulse or scroll, and speed is slow, normal or fast. qr puts a QR code on the sign: a link, any text, or a Wi-Fi payload like WIFI:T:WPA;S:Cafe%20Guest;P:coffee123;;. qrpos places it in a corner (tl, tr, bl, br, the default) or below the text, and qrsize sets its side from 10 to 50% of the screen's shorter side. The code is always black on white, so it scans on a dark sign, and the text is fitted around it. A setting that does not make sense is ignored rather than shown as an error, because a sign has nowhere to put one. Opening a link that has a message goes straight to the sign with no editor in the way; Exit or the Escape key brings the editor back. A link that has been encoded twice over on its way to you, as happens when one app hands it to another, is repaired rather than shown as a wall of percent signs.

Because the message is in the part of the address after the #, it is never sent to our server: browsers keep that part to themselves. It does stay in your browser history, and in the history of anyone you send it to. The tab title shows the sign's first line, so a sign is easy to find again among your tabs.

Keeping the screen on

While a sign is showing, the page asks the browser to keep the screen awake, and lets go when you exit. Most current browsers allow this. If yours does not, the page says so under the buttons, and the screen will dim on its normal timer — turn up the display's sleep time for a sign that has to stay up all evening.

Show sign also asks the browser to hide its own toolbars where it can. On an iPhone, Safari cannot do that for a web page, so the sign fills the page and the browser's address bar stays where it is.

What it does not do

There are no pictures or display fonts here — the sign uses your device's own system font, as the rest of this site does — and only the two calm animations. Flashing, shaking, bouncing and colour-cycling text are left out on purpose: flashing can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, and the others make a sign harder to read from across a room. If you need those, bigwords.page does them in the same kind of link, for free and with no sign-up; it loads Cloudflare's cookieless visitor statistics, which this site does not.