![]() Solid style gains with shading, but the price paid is in the amount of detail possible in small areas of text. Solid style art is almost exclusively large in terms of the number of characters used. For example, a 'b' could be used in place of an '8' if a similar shading was required, but the top right of that square isn't supposed to be part of the shaded area. A disadvantage of solid style is that a picture can look very different when viewed in black text on white background if the picture was designed for white text on black background (or vice versa).Ī technique often used in solid style art is 'anti-aliasing' for defining edges more precisely than the given size of each character. This style uses the relative 'heaviness' of the characters as shading on the picture, for example a sequence from light to dark might use characters:, : S % #. Artists tend to stick primarily to one or the other, as they require different sorts of techniques, though occasionally both styles are used, even in the same picture. There are two main styles of ASCII art, 'solid' and 'line'. The newsgroup for ASCII art, alt.ascii-art, covers not only email signatures and pictures, but also ![]() A program, called Figlet, has been written that takes a string of text (for example your name) and returns it in ASCII art, in any of a number of 'fonts'. Particularly, in newsgroups and email, ASCII art is used for diagrams and signatures. Today ASCII art is still created and used in many of the above media. The rise of the Internet, with Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), Multi-User Domains (MUDs), email, newsgroups, and later the Web, provided further areas in which ASCII art could develop. The invention of the typewriter, and later radio teletype (RTTY) led to art closer to today's ASCII art - creating a picture 'in its own right' from the characters, rather than shaping The first uses of text to create pictures (unless you count hieroglyphs) were to shape the words of a poem or other passage of text into a picture Lewis Carroll being one of the first to do this in Alice in Wonderland (1865). ![]() There are only so many ways to combine the characters, to the extent that some very small pictures may even have been independently created more than once by different people. ASCII art is one of the most restricted media, and perhaps the closest to being 'finite'. In any case, restrictions are not always a bad thing - as in many areas of art, working in a restricted field forces one to explore the available resources to the fullest, and can lead to surprising results. HTML art tends to encompass ASCII art but includes colours, flashing sections of text etc, all of which may not translate well. Relatives of ASCII art with different restrictions are less universal: ANSI art ('Extended ASCII') uses a larger character set, but unfortuntely the extra characters can vary between computer systems. Why so many restrictions? They exist so that anybody on any computer system can view the art pretty much as the artist intended. If the following lines are the same length, then it is set correctly: If the pictures in this entry appear mangled or squashed, then you need to change the 'fixed width' font on your browser. It is intended to be viewed in a fixed width font, such as Courier, FixedSys, or Monaco. Specifically ASCII art uses only these characters: Everybody will have seen and used the ubiquitous one line smileys, but there is far more to ASCII art, for example this Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy logo by Joan Stark (jgs):ĪSCII art is art 'drawn' using the characters of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set.
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