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From: radman@nospam.acid.org (RaD Man)
Subject: [CORRECTION] Re: Read me first! FAQ: New to alt.ascii-art?
Date: 1997/11/25
Message-ID: <347b5974.79659976@3com.news.internex.net>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 292671797
References: <65cefi$uer$7@mnementh.southern.co.nz>
Reply-To: radman@nospam.acid.org
Organization: ACiD Productions
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art,alt.ascii-art.animation



This is all wrong ;)  

	Any computer is quite capable of supporting ANSI's standard for
"advanced data communication control procedures".  Aka ANSI Escape Codes.

	ANSI is not a character set at all.  The standard which was designed by
American National Standards Institute which has been dubbed "ANSI" was meant to
be a standard mode of communication between dumb terminals.  The "ANSI" standard
itself does not contain any characters which do not already exist in the basic
ASCII character set.  However, many, if not most "ANSI Artists" choose to use
IBM-Extended or Amiga-Extended proprietary character sets in their ANSI art, but
that's besides the point.  

	I think the originator of this faq is most likely referring to IBM
Extended ASCII, which adds the additional 128 characters to basic ASCII for it's
operating system, PC DOS.  To make matters more confusing, non PC based systems
started referring to ANSI as "IBM-ANSI" when really it's not ANSI at all, it's
ADCCP developed by the ANSI.

	Hope I've confused everyone.  More details may be found at
http://artpacks.acid.org/www/html/intro.html

On 24 Nov 1997 17:45:22 GMT, cfbd@southern.co.nz (Colin Douthwaite) wrote:

%There is another character set known as ANSI (after the American
%National Standards Institute), which consists of the ASCII set with
%another 128 characters added to it (128-255), for special characters
%such as the copyright symbol and various accented letters. You should
%NOT use these characters in ASCII art, though, because they are not
%nearly as standardized -- some computers do not support ANSI characters,
%and those that do often have different ideas about which code stands for
%which character (the Macintosh ANSI characters, for example, are
%different from the Windows ones).

--
  Words to live by: " It's better to be controversial for the
  right reasons, than to be popular for the wrong reasons. "

 RaD Man % ACiD Productions Founder % Artpacks Archive Founder
       ACiD Productions' Website -=- http://www.acid.org
     Artpacks Archive Website -=- http://artpacks.acid.org
         ACiD Team RC5-64 ! The Distributed.Net Effort
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