ASCII art

ASCII art, an artistic medium relying primarily on computers for presentation, consists of pictures pieced together from characters (preferably from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII). They can be created with any text editor, and are often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a non-proportional font (fixed-width font, like on a traditional typewriter) for presentation.

ASCII art was and is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics. This includes typewriters, teletypes, non-graphic computer terminals, in early computer networking (e.g., BBSes), e-mail, and Usenet news messages.

Types and examples of ASCII art

The simplest forms of ASCII Art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. Rotate these examples mentally 90 degrees clockwise for a more recognizable orientation of these emoticons:

More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures. Some common examples:

It is popular to put such art in one's signature block to be included in all one's e-mail and Usenet postings (see also: ASCII cows).

Some types ignore the particular shape of the characters and treat them as more-or-less filled (dithered) boxes:

Another type sometimes seen is creating a word using only one kind of character per letter. For example:

One use for ASCII art is to create unique typography, for example:

The program Figlet (and other programs that support its standard) allow for the design and use of ASCII fonts.

Methods for generating ASCII art

There exist specialized text editors designed to draw lines, boxes, and filled areas easily. It's straightforward to generate ASCII art algorithmically. Converting a bitmap to ASCII art is a special case of vector quantization. An example of a generated image, beside the original, is given below:

Another method is to sample the image down to grayscale with less than 8-bit precision, and then assign a character for each value, just as this does.

In the 1970s and early 1980s it was popular to produce a kind of ASCII art that relied on overprinting -- the overall darkness of a particular character space dependent on how many characters, as well as the choice of character, printed in a particular place. Thanks to the increased granularity of tone, photographs were often converted to this type of printout. Even daisy wheel printers could be used. The technique has fallen from popularity since all cheap printers can easily print photographs, and a normal text file (or an e-mail message or Usenet posting) cannot represent overprinted text. However, something similar has emerged to replace it: shaded or colored ASCII art, using ANSI video terminal markup or HTML to add a bit more tone variation.

Animated ASCII art is possible by embedding ANSI video terminal escape sequences for cursor movement into the "picture".

Glyph mosaics in Japan

In Japan, the glyph mosaic art form achieves unique development. The so-called "ASCII art" produced in Japan often uses the thousands of extra characters in the JIS or Unicode character sets for more elaborate art. The largest source of recent "JIS Art" is the 2ch BBS, and characters and stories in these "JIS Arts" are gaining popularity and recognition with emergence of this BBS. Cultural similarity with Manga (Japanese comic) can be observed. A simple example of Japanese style of the Ascii art is "orz" and represents a man on all four kneeling in an expression of the despair. "o" is the head, "r" is arms and shoulders, and "z" is the back and bent legs.

Placing ASCII art in HTML pages

ASCII artwork embedded in an HTML document must be placed within the <pre>...</pre> preformatted text element to ensure that arrangement of the characters will display properly with monospace fonts (aka non-proportional fonts).

It allows navigational maps, with some or every "pixel" (i.e. character) being a link. Some consecutive characters can also be a single link. However, is does not seem possible to have a multi-line area being a single link, like in image maps using the <area> tag (e.g. ). Of course some character sequences on different lines can link to the target, but if a link highlights when the cursor is at it, not the whole area is highlighted.

Example, with both the city outline and the label clickable:

See also

• PabloDraw for Windows Freeware; features a revolutionary peer-to-peer "joint editing" mode
• () FIGlet font generators
• Freeware; A java ASCII editor with standard Photoshop-style tools, image conversion, FIGlet support, math formulas editor and a lot of other features.
• Freeware; A 32-bit Windows program that converts a large variety of images to ASCII art.
• Freeware; Transforms bitmaps to text (even analyses symbol fonts)
• GNU GPL; Draws ASCII art boxes around text. Useful for programmers.

ASCII art groups

ASCII art groups are defined as organized bodies of people dedicated to the purpose of creating ASCII text based artwork.

• ASCII artists which predominantly make use of the IBM-PC Russian ASCII codepage
• : It's pronounced "Pen Fifteen"
• Remorse 1981: The ASCII division of ACiD Productions
• telnet version of the Star Wars movie)
• The original Matrix movie in ASCII on a DVD
• : requires Japanese font (available free from Windows/IE update, for Windows users)
• (in Japanese)
• Nerd Boy, an ASCII comic strip by Joaquim Gandara.
• Huge collection by Andreas Freise sorted by words(topics).