X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fbb9d,a48d1090bff8a100 X-Google-Attributes: gidfbb9d,public From: Rosemary Lyndall Wemm Subject: Talk: GIF or JPG into ASCII art Date: 1996/01/09 Message-ID: <4ct49n$5qb@miso.wwa.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 134587257 sender: boba@sashimi.wwa.com references: <4cqv0u$gnt@miso.wwa.com> organization: DIALix Services, Perth, Australia. newsgroups: rec.arts.ascii On 8 Jan 1996, Landon Durnan wrote: > While downloading pictures Ftp it gives you a choice: Binary, > Ascii, Cancel. > Now when i said save it as ascii i tried opening the file and it > wouldnt open. > Does this gif or jpg turn into ascii art? Definitely not! It simply turns into a corrupt graphics file which cannot be turned into a picture by a graphics programme using graphics mode screen processing. :-) ASCII format is used for text files. It means that the file is copied to your system in such a way that only those symbols which you see on a normal typewriter keyboard can be seen on your screen when you view the file on a "text" screen. Any non-printing symbol which is encountered is translated into machine language to perform a particular function. Some of the extended ASCII character set [i.e. those symbols which you can't type in from a normal typewriter keyboard] are used to format the information so that it appears in lines and paragraphs on the screen. Others ring the bell, start and stop the printer, log you out of the system, etc. ASCII format is used for text files which run on normal text screens. You can only see the characters which you would normally see on a typewriter {96 of them}; all other characters are suppressed. The invisable non-printing characters [also called the Extended ASCII set] work behind the scenes to format the text (lines, spacing, paragraphs), start and stop the printer, ring the bell, get you out of the text reader and log your out of the system. If you download a file using ASCII format the programme will prepare it for text reading by translating a selection of the non-printing characters into line-feeds, end of line marks, etc. However, these characters mean something quite different in GIF and JPEG format. Graphic file formats use the full range of ASCII characters - those you can see on the keyboard and those you can't - to encode a picture made up of dots. It has to be read by a graphics translating programme on a screen running in graphics mode. [Any text which appears on such a screen has been translated into graphics mode, which is a lot slower than text mode.] These files have to be downloaded exactly as they are, without any translation. This is called Binary format. If you try to read a binary graphics file with a text reader you will get a lot of strange symbols on your screen and the computer will do some very odd things which you might not want to happen [eg the bell may ring, the printer will turn on or you may be logged out]. If you download a binary file using ASCII format some of the characters will be translated into formatting instructions and a graphics reader won't be able to make any sense of it. It will be as much gibberish as a binary file read by a text reader. ASCII art are pictures and diagrams made out of the printing symbols of text files. You can't get ASCII art by downloading a graphics file in text format: it merely corrupts the file. If you want to change a graphic file to an ASCII approximation then you have to use a programme which will do this for you. Most programmes like this work from GIF files. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rosemary Lyndall Wemm Rosemary from DownUnder _--_|\ Clinical Neuro-psychologist lyndall@haywire.DIALix.oz.au Perth / \ Perth, Western Australia berry@perth.DIALix.oz.au -->\_.--._/ ------------------- http://haywire.dialix.com/~lyndall -----------------v-