Print a sign: a few words, as large as one sheet of paper lets them be

What is on the sheet

• The big words, up to 60 characters, in thick plain letters, in the middle of the sheet.
• Small words underneath, if you type them: up to 120 characters on 1 to 4 lines, written as you type them and never larger than half the big letters.
• An arrow, if you ask for one: left, right, up or down. An arrow pointing up stands above the words; the others stand under them.
• A frame around the edge, if you ask for one. The words then keep a little further from the edge.
• Nothing else. No picture, no date, no name of this site.

How the letters are made large

• The page tries 1 line, 2 lines, and so on up to 6. For each it finds the breaks that make the widest line as narrow as it can be, then works out how large the letters could be: the widest line has to fit the width, and all the lines have to fit the height.
• It keeps the number of lines with the largest letters, and the fewest lines when two come out the same.
• Fewer words make larger letters. EXIT fills a sheet; a whole sentence does not.
• Words are not split. One very long word sets the size of every line, unless you take the tick out of “the same size”: then every line is made as wide as the sheet.
• You can break the lines yourself. Take the tick out of “Break the lines for me” and every line you type is a line on the sign, up to 6.
• Upright or sideways: the page can try both and keep the one with the larger big letters.

Paper and ink

• One sheet, with a margin of half an inch that home printers leave white. The drawing is made smaller to fit the paper in the printer, Letter or A4.
• The print window is asked for upright or sideways paper. If the sign looks small in the preview there, set Layout or Orientation by hand.
• White letters on black cover the sheet in black. That uses a lot of ink or toner, and some print windows leave it out unless Background graphics is ticked.
• The letters are your device’s own plain letters (Arial, Helvetica or the nearest it has), so the shapes can differ a little from one device to another. The page measures them on your device before it sets the size.
• It has been tried in one browser’s print preview (Chromium, saved as PDF), not on paper from a real printer.

What this page does not do

• It does not know any rule about signs. A sign that a law, an inspector, a landlord or an insurer asks for may need set words, sizes, colors or pictures. This page knows none of them: ask whoever asks for the sign.
• It does not say from how far a sign can be read. That depends on the eyes, the light and the place. Hang it and walk back to see.
• It does not read the words: it cannot tell whether they are spelled right, true or kind. Everyone who passes will read them, so read the sign over before you hang it.
• It has no pictures and no colors other than black and white.
• It keeps nothing: close the page and the words are gone.

Every time the page is built, a program checks 53 examples worked by hand. Then it makes up 2,000 signs, with long and short words, accents, small words, arrows and frames, and draws each the way the page draws it. A second reader, written separately, takes the lines, sizes and places back off the drawing. It checks that every word is there in order, that every line and the arrow are inside the margin and touch nothing else, that the small words are no larger than half the big ones, that the whole stands in the middle, and that the big words could not be larger. Where the page broke the lines, it tries every other way of breaking them. The program uses made-up letter widths; the widths of real letters come from your device, and those were tried in one browser only.