[HN Gopher] ASCII Art: From a Commodity into an Obscurity
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ASCII Art: From a Commodity into an Obscurity
Author : california-og
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-12-27 14:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.glyphdrawing.club)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.glyphdrawing.club)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Could using ASCII Art in the 21st century be said to be letting
| one's geek flag fly? ### ,d88b.d88b, +-------+
| # 88888888888 | ASCII | # `Y8888888Y' | |
| # `Y888Y' | Art | ### `Y' +-------+
| binaryapparatus wrote:
| Found somewhere on stackoverflow many years ago and being my
| shell banner ever since: .-------. |
| Hi | '-------' ^ (\_/)
| '----- (O.o) (> <)
| glxxyz wrote:
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| kristopolous wrote:
| The katakana tsu along with the high horizontal bar makes that
| unicode art. I guess ^\\_(''/)_/^ is valid ASCII ART although
| kinda looks like the guy's getting robbed.
| glxxyz wrote:
| I was too subtle, sorry
| mycall wrote:
| UNICODE, while it includes ASCII, now ubiquitous, is what the
| layman considers as text art now and far into the future.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's not ubiquitous. I'm seeing a square "undefined
| character" glyph in the above example.
| ben_w wrote:
| Just one moment before seeing this, I was looking at a large
| example (too big for a phone) on a NH user profile:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=some_furry
|
| Ah, the Old Days, when life was simple and adulting was my
| parent's problem.
| glxxyz wrote:
| Looks fine in Chrome's desktop mode on a phone.
| b5 wrote:
| I still dabble in ASCII art a bit, mostly in HTML comments and
| email headers. It's kind of a difficult art-form to practice now,
| given that monospaced text is relatively rare.
|
| Here's are my pets in ASCII, who go out in the headers of my
| emails: .-"-.
| ^...^ |\./| /|^ ^|\ (=^I^=) )) =(^,^)=))
| {/(_O_)\} / " \ (( | | (( _/ ^ \_))
| ( |"| ))) (|||))) (/ /'\ \) ==m m== =m'm=
| ""' '""
| Joker_vD wrote:
| With judicious use of VT100 codes and sleep(), you can do
| animation as well: #!/usr/bin/env python3
| from time import sleep def width():
| while True: yield from range(3, 11)
| yield from range(9, 1, -1)
| print('(\\___/)\n(>O.o<)\n(>[||]<)\n(")_(")') for w in
| width(): l = '(>[' + w * '|' + ']<)'
| print(f'\x1b7\x1b[2A\x1b[K{l}\x1b8', end='', flush=True)
| sleep(0.1)
| a1o wrote:
| It's weird for me to se an article about a visual subject without
| a single screenshot about the thing it's writing about.
| Evidlo wrote:
| When did Unicode become popular on the internet? The article
| seems to claim it was around since the transition from BBSes
| started in 1995.
|
| Also, a contributing factor to the decline not mentioned is the
| prevalence of non-monospace fonts.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It was around in the 90s (Java, Windows NT) but didn't hit its
| stride in documents until utf8 was created and took over, maybe
| five or ten years later.
| kingforaday wrote:
| Used this[1] for over twenty years for random things. An easy way
| to make quick text into different forms of ASCII art. I find it
| easier than using the `figlet`[2] command.
|
| 1.
| http://patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Graffiti&t=Hac...
|
| 2. http://www.figlet.org
| nibbula wrote:
| At least as long as situtations exist where communication is
| restricted to characters, character art will persist.
| ___ ______ /__/\ ___/_____/\
| FrobTech, Inc. \ \ \ / /\\
| \ \ \_/__ / \ "If you've got the job,
| _\ \ \ /\_____/___ \ we've got the frob."
| // \__\/ / \ /\ \ _______//_______/ \ /
| _\/______ / / \ \ / / / /\
| __/ / \ \ / / / / _\__ / / /
| \_______\/ / / / / /\
| /_/______/___________________/ /________/ /___/ \ \ \
| \ ___________ \ \ \ \ \ / \_\ \ /
| /\ \ \ \ \___\/ \ \/ / \ \
| \ \ / \_____/ / \ \ \________\/
| /__________/ \ \ / \ _____ \
| /_____\/ This .signature gratuitously \ /
| /\ \ / \ \ \ refers to k /____/ \
| \ / \ \ \ i \ \
| /___\/ \ \ \ b \____\/
| \__\/ o
| b5 wrote:
| Yes and no. Mostly no, I think.
|
| In a lot of cases (most?) even plain-text email is rendered in
| proportional fonts which don't work for ASCII art.
|
| The default for all mobile email clients, Gmail, Outlook, and
| Apple Mail is now to render plain-text in proportional. Those
| who get it monospaced have _chosen_ to do that. It's also made
| worse by Outlook's insistence on removing 'extra' linebreaks by
| default. AFAIK, there's no way to switch off that behaviour
| except email-by-email, and you can't know if your recipient has
| it or not.
| tomxor wrote:
| There is still one place it's guaranteed to work, code.
|
| I have occasionally used small ASCII based diagrams inside
| comment blocks where it felt appropriate and it works very
| nicely... I'm not a big documentation inside code guy, but
| like to include it sparingly for the most unobvious code.
|
| Limited to more utilitarian "art", but it at least is
| guaranteed to work, I've never seen or heard of anyone
| successfully using proportional fonts for programming
| (although I have seen people try).
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > There is still one place it's guaranteed to work, code.
|
| No. If somebody (a color theme) uses italic text for
| comments, ASCII arts breaks.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > by Outlook's insistence on removing 'extra' linebreaks by
| default
|
| And screw that - any idea why it does so?
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Emojis are characters (consist of Unicode scalar values).
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| ASCII art (in slightly different form) was around before the
| 1990s.
|
| Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where
| you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very
| crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)
|
| When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very
| early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type
| 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in
| primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know
| how old they were.
|
| (1) https://petapixel.com/2012/07/20/atari-compugraph-foto-an-
| as...
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| There is the famous Fortran Snoopy calendar from the end of the
| 60s (written in Fortran 66).
| https://gunkies.org/wiki/Snoopy_Calendar
| anthk wrote:
| I still use aamath, it's faster than anything else and formulae
| will be read everywhere.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2018)
| adityaathalye wrote:
| I love m'colleague _dwimmer_ 's text art:
| https://www.instagram.com/dwimmertxt/
|
| He hand-crafted _animated_ text art for a game project [1], which
| I had the pleasure to implement [2]. [?](
| [?]/[?][?] [?][?] [?][?] [?]( [?][?][?][?] [?][?][?] \ [?]
| a''Uoe [?] / [?][?] [?][?][?][?] [?][?][?] [?][?] [?][?][?]
| [?]_) [?] (_[?] [?][?] [?]_) [?][?][?][?] [?]_[?] [?][?]
| [?];i'lZ [?][?] [?]_) [?][?][?][?] [?]_[?] [?][?] [?]_[?]
| G G \ G [?]/[?][?] G [?][?] [?].! [?] [?][?] G
| [?][?]\[?] G / G z[?]h, qO!kh tSPtskh,
| [?]z[?]h, [?][?] [?] ? [?] [?][?] tSPtskh,[?] z[?]h, qO!kh
| a`~![?]e a''Uoe Ce'i a`~![?]e \{iiuii}/ Ce'i
| a`~![?]e a''Uo [?],ts`~i [?];i'lZ [?]Ch''~`'?
| [?],ts`~i )/-\( [?]Ch''~`'? [?],ts`~i [?];i
|
| [1] _Hanukkah of Data_ https://hanukkah.bluebird.sh/5784/
|
| [2] I wrote about the process here:
| https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Wait... That's not ASCII!
| saulpw wrote:
| Neither is -\\_(tsu)_/- but no one blinks at that kind of
| text art anymore. Unicode is everywhere--even if not all
| glyphs are supported, the vast majority of the BMP is. ASCII-
| only art is a relic like trigraphs. Also note that most ASCII
| art is actually CP437 or "extended ASCII", so it was never
| even pure ASCII in the first place.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| True, it is unicode.
|
| I would argue text art evolved with the, ah, Times.
|
| If anything, crafting with unicode brings its own set of
| challenges alongside those of old skool ASCII art. A bigger
| character palette, yes, but also variable character widths.
| Composing is less obvious.
|
| Your remark prompted me to look up the Wikipedia page for
| ASCII art, and according to that page, unicode is indeed the
| "new skool" of the form. cf.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art#Unicode
|
| That said, I'm hardly an artist and present this as my
| layperson's understanding.
| DanAtC wrote:
| My favorite source http://www.asciiartfarts.com/
| ykonstant wrote:
| I love ASCII art so much; my very first experience with computers
| was a DOS program that printed ASCII art pictures on my family's
| dot matrix printer. I could not even read yet and I was
| entranced.
| CM30 wrote:
| ASCII art also played a big role in the early video walkthrough
| world too. Back then, sites like GameFAQs only accepted plain
| text documents for their guides, so ASCII art was the only way to
| add any form of images or decorations to your work, and make them
| look more interesting than a giant wall of text.
|
| So the folks who wrote 50,000 word guides to the latest Zelda or
| Final Fantasy game also usually ended up becoming pretty good as
| ASCII art too.
|
| Unfortunately, this era also died for various reasons. Most
| notably, the world of text based guides and simple message boards
| got replaced by a mix of wikis and sites that could actually
| support images, as well as video walkthroughs on sites like
| YouTube.
|
| So when the relevance of GameFAQs and its ilk faded, so did the
| importance of ASCII art.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| My most upvoted ASCII art on HN. The Van Halen logo, RIP.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24703707
| jsrcout wrote:
| Just wanted to mention my favorite ASCII art ever - Simon
| Jansen's monumental ASCII art version of Star Wars from the late
| 1990s. Comes with a great FAQ as a bonus.
|
| https://www.asciimation.co.nz/
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