ASCII Art

> I rarely see ASCII art these days. There was a retro
ASCII Art 
> newsletter that was published every few months which
had some ASCII art 
> in it, but sadly the people behind it have decided to
stop making it. 
> Only 5 issues exist, and at present I only have issue
5

I feel there are 2 subtly-different forms of ASCII-Art. The
first is 
essantally 2-colour, and uses characters of the right shape
to form the 
image. The second uses characters of different average
densitys to form a 
sort-of greyscale image.

The former is used (and I still regularly use it) for things
like 
schematic diagrams. I think I've worked out ASCII-Art
versions of the 
symbols for all common components, and I've drawn up quite
complex 
scheamtics that way.

The second, which seems to be a lot rarer, is the sort of
thing used for 
that picture of the cat, I guess.

-tony

At 03:05 AM 12/30/2007, ardp850ug1.demon.co.uk wrote:
>I feel there are 2 subtly-different forms of ASCII-Art.
The first is 
>essantally 2-colour, and uses characters of the right
shape to form the 
>image. The second uses characters of different average
densitys to form a 
>sort-of greyscale image.

There were many approaches, of course.  There were
typewriter 
artists in the same style, years before teletypes.  Many old
RTTY 
images were built by hand.  Certainly many RTTY images were
ported to computers and are still passed around today.  If
you
have kids on MySpace, you'll see that ASCII art is still
very
popular when posted as comments on your friend's web pages.

Later computer-generated pictures were certainly automated
through 
several sorts of scanning processes and subsequent
assignment of 
grey to chars.  For example, with any early computer that
could 
drive a teletype and digitize a crude value from a
phototransistor 
mounted on the print head, you can feed a photograph through
the print 
roller, "print" nothing, read the values and
"scan" the image.

The choice of chars could include schemes for overstrike -
sending 
a line with a carriage return but without the line-feed, and
overprinting
to make new one-char-space greys.

I talk about this on my page http://www.threedee.
com/jcm/aaa/ .
A long time ago I wrote a filter to translate overstrike
ASCII
files into Adobe Illustrator files.  This gave a path to 
printer-independent overstrike, choice of fonts, and 
direct rasterization of the image via PhotoShop, which can
read the AI files.

Fully automated conversion of old ASCII art to bitmaps can
be 
tricky.  There are other feed-control characters explicit
or
implicit in some of the original files, such as form feed 
and vertical tab.  Some ASCII art came with its own
printing
program to interpret the image data.

They come in all rotations.  As you can see in the Einstein

example on my page, the chars used to print Albert are
"upside down".
Some images are portrait, others landscape.  Some are
assembled of 
several strips or even just partial strips, taped together. 
More 
subtle infidelities happen when the font's glyphs don't
exactly 
match the original.

Then there's the huge realm of ANSI art from the late 80s /
early 90s,
using the VT-100 / PC-ish conventions for positioning the
cursor 
on the 80x24 screen, erasing, refreshing, or animating,
often
passed around on BBSes.

- John