ASCII art
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ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII. The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners to make the division between print jobs easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk.
Pre-ASCII-Like Art
Before ASCII there were several teleprinter character sets used for landline and shortwave printing messages. The Baudot character set was used for news wire service text from about 1930 to 1990. It was common for wire service offices to have several rolls of teletype art stored on paper tape. Christmas was a particularly common theme. The UPI wire service had a large "Baudot-art" poster of a troika of horses pulling a sleigh. Radio amateurs also did a lot of Baudot-art, often of the pinup variety.
History of ASCII art
The usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The limitations of computers of that time period necessitated the use of text characters to represent images. Along with ASCII's use in communication, however, it also began to appear in the underground online art groups of the period.
During the 1990s, the Internet grew at a rapid pace, and technology improved with it. Indeed, ASCII art appeared so unnecessary by 1998 that Microsoft declared the graphic style "dead" and encouraged users to create files in GIF or JPEG format instead. The supposed death of ASCII art may also be related to the increasing prevalence of variable-width fonts that make ASCII art nearly impossible. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUDs (textual multiplayer roleplaying games), Internet Relay Chat, E-mail, message boards and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width fonts.
Uses for ASCII art
ASCII art is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics, or in some cases, where the transmission of pictures is not possible. This includes typewriters, teletypes, non-graphic computer terminals, in early computer networking (e.g., BBSes), e-mail, and Usenet news messages. ASCII art is also used within the source code of computer programs for representation of company or product logos, and flow control or other diagrams. In some cases, the entire source code of a program is a piece of ASCII art - for instance, an entry to one of the earlier International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a program that adds numbers, but visually looks like a binary adder drawn in logic ports.
ASCII art is also very commonly used amongst software piracy groups to display group logos inside text (*.nfo) files containing the instructions for installing and cracking the software (though these commonly use PC text mode characters as well as just ASCII). An example of ASCII art predating the modern computer era can be found in the October 1948 edition of Popular Mechanics[1]
Taking the medium to extremes, there exists a video driver for the popular video game Quake that displays the game in ASCII art. ASCII art is used almost exclusively in the making of DOS-based ZZT games. Another example of ASCII art in games is "Original War", a little-known game for windows, in which the cutscenes for the Russians are made up totally of ASCII art
Almost all pirated-material release groups now use ASCII art in their release's accompanying .NFO files.
Types of ASCII art
Emoticons and verticons
The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. They are commonly referred to as 'emoticon', 'smilie', or 'smiley'.
There is another type of one-line ASCII art that does not require the mental rotation of pictures, which is widely known in Japan as kaomoji (literally "face characters".) Traditionally, they are referred to as "ASCII face ". Some of the below, can also be referred to as Kirby, the Nintendo character. Today, some call them "verticons":
More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures.
Full pictures
Entire pictures can be drawn using ASCII art, as in this more intricate example, which depicts the historic Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand
ASCII typography
Other ASCII art ignores the particular shape of the characters and instead uses their overall boldness or lightness to create varying gradients. One use for ASCII art is to create unique typography, for example:
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The program Figlet (and other programs that support its standard) allow for the design and use of ASCII fonts:
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"Amiga" style ASCII art
This is an example of "Amiga style" (also referred to as "oldschool style") scene ASCII art. This kind of ASCII art is hand made in a text editor. Popular editors used to make this kind of ASCII art include CygnusEditor aka CED (Amiga) and EditPlus2 (PC).
"Block" ASCII art
Methods for generating ASCII art
While some prefer to use a simple text editor to produce ASCII art, specialized programs have been developed that often simulate the features and tools in bitmap image editors.
Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to ASCII art, which is a special case of vector quantization. A method is to sample the image down to grayscale with less than 8-bit precision, and then assign a character for each value.
An example of a converted image, created using Ascgen dotNet, is given below, next to the original.
With the advent of the web and HTML and CSS, many ASCII conversion programs will now quantize to a full RGB colorspace, enabling colorized ASCII images. Below is a colorized example, converted with ASCII Convert, to HTML:
| 133t people |
|---|
| baziiboi |
| Shadow Yoshi |
| TO BE CONTINUED |
 |
 |
File:Bilde 5.png |
Non fixed-width ASCII
Most ASCII art is created using a monospace font, where all characters are identical in width (Courier New is a popular font). However, most of the more commonly used fonts in word processors, web browsers and other programs are proportional fonts, such as Arial or Times New Roman, where different widths are used for different characters. ASCII art drawn for a fixed width font will usually appear distorted, or even unrecognisable when displayed in a proportional font.
Some ASCII artists have produced art for display in such fonts. These ASCIIs, rather than using a purely shade-based correspondence, use characters for slopes and borders and use block shading. These ASCIIs generally offer greater precision and attention to detail than fixed-width ASCIIs for a lower character count, although they are not as universally accessible since they are usually relatively font-specific.
Animated ASCII art
The History of Animated ASCII Art started in 1970 from so-called VT100 animations produced on vt100 terminals. These animations were simply text with cursor movement instructions, deleting and erasing the characters necessary to appear animated. Usually, they represented a long hand-crafted process undertaken by a single person to tell a story. Nowadays we are still able to see these ancient art pieces using a special player, for instance V6.10 for Windows. A rather large collection of VT100 files could be found here: http://artscene.textfiles.com
Contemporary web browsers gave new breath to Animated ASCII Art. It has become possible to produce animated ascii art using Java Script or Java applet which changes static ASCII art pictures, creating the frame by frame animation. A new term was born: ASCIImation - another name of Animated ASCII Art. This word came from www.asciimation.co.nz - the web site dedicated to the total reconstruction of the Star Wars saga in ASCII animation. This project started in 1997 and continues to this day.
Nowadays there are many tools and programs which transform the pixels that make up images into text symbols. Some of these can even do this with streaming video. For instance, the music video for pop singer Beck's song "Black Tambourine" (here to watch on Google Video) is made up entirely of ASCII characters that approximate the original footage. A large number of program-produced ASCII animations can be found here: http://yagii.spik.swps.edu.pl/
The most powerful asciimations, however, are those made by hand, frame by frame. These asciimations are usually very individual and convey the style and feelings of their creators. JavE - Java Ascii Versatile Editor could be considered one of the best free editors dealing with ASCII art and ASCIImations. Very few websites are dedicated to hand made asciimations, and many of these have not been updated from 1998-2000. One of the biggest and most regularly updated is www.asciimator.net, a website started in 2005 at which one can create and publish asciimations online.
Other text-based art
There are a variety of other types of art using text symbols from character sets other than ASCII and/or some form of color coding. Despite not being pure ASCII, these are still often referred to as "ASCII art". The character set portion designed specifically for drawing are known as the line drawing characters or pseudo-graphics.
IBM PC
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So called "block ASCII" or "high ASCII" uses the extended characters of the 8-bit code page 437, which is a proprietary standard that was introduced by IBM in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC and MS DOS operating system. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform for computer enthusiasts around the world. "Block ASCIIs" were dominating the PC Text Art Scene.
In the art scene the only popular ASCII style during this time that used the 7-bit standard ASCII character set was the so called "Oldskool" Style. It is also called "Amiga style", due to its origin and widespread use on the Commodore Amiga Computers. The style uses primarily the characters: _/\-+=.()<>:. The "oldskool" art looks more like the outlined drawings of shapes than real pictures.[1]
Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard x3.16. You can look at "Block ASCIIs" with a text editor using the font "Terminal", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist. You need a special ASCII/ANSI viewer such as ACiDView for Windows (see ASCII and ANSI art viewers) to view block ASCII and ANSI Files properly in Windows.
The IBM PC graphics hardware in text mode uses 16 bits per character. It supports a variety of configurations, but in its default mode under DOS they are used to give 256 glyphs from one of the IBM PC code pages (Code page 437 by default), 16 foreground colors, 8 background colors, and a flash option. Such art can be loaded into screen memory directly. ANSI.SYS, if loaded, also allows such art to be placed on screen by outputting escape sequences that indicate movements of the screen cursor and color/flash changes. If this method is used then the art becomes known as ANSI art. The IBM PC code pages also include characters intended for simple drawing which often made this art appear much cleaner than that made with more traditional character sets. Plain text files are also seen with these characters, though they have become far less common since Windows GUI text editors (using the Windows ANSI code page) have largely replaced DOS based ones.
Shift_JIS
A large character selection, the widespread use of Japanese on the internet, and the availability of standard fonts with predictable spacing make Shift JIS a common format for text based art on the internet.
Unicode
Unicode would seem to offer the ultimate flexibility in producing text based art with its huge variety of characters. However, finding a suitable fixed-width font is likely to be difficult if a significant subset of Unicode is desired. (Modern UNIX-style operating systems do provide complete fixed-width Unicode fonts, e.g. for xterm.) Also, the common practice of rendering Unicode with a mixture of variable width fonts is likely to make predictable display hard if more than a tiny subset of Unicode is used.
Overprinting
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 manual typewriters or 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 color codes (such as those found in HTML, IRC, and many internet message boards) to add a bit more tone variation. In this way, it is possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color.
See also
Further reading
- Danet, Brenda. Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001. ISBN 1-85973-424-3.
- Riddell, Alan, ed. Typewriter Art. London, UK: London Magazine Editions (LME), 1975. ISBN 900-626-99-2.
- Roemer, Madge. Fun With Your Typewriter. Indian Hills, CO, USA: The Falcon's Wing Press, 1956. LCCN 56-13336.
References
- ^ The three Styles of the Underground ASCII Art Scene, Article 01, 2006