ASCII art Totally Explained

Everything about Asciiart totally explained

"Newskool" style ASCII art

Another popular style of the PC underground art scene, which is using primarily the characters like "$#Xxo." was called "Newskool". This label is actually inaccurate because the style wasn't "new"; on the contrary it was very old but fell out of favor and was replaced by "Oldskool" and "Block" style ASCII art. Most sceners thought that this is a new style and dubbed it "Newskool" when it had its "come back" and became popular again at the end of the nineties.
"Newskool" continued to evolve and the use of extended proprietary characters was introduced. The classic 7-bit standard ASCII characters remain still predominant. The extended characters are primarily used for "fine tuning" and "tweaking" of the ASCII image. With the introduction and wide spread adaptation of Unicode the style developed further and new forms of text art evolved from that as well.

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. For Block ASCII art and ANSI art the artist almost always uses a special text editor, because the required characters are not available on a standard keyboard.
The special text editors have sets of special characters assigned to existing keys on the keyboard. Popular MS DOS based editors, such as TheDraw and ACiDDraw had multiple sets of different special characters mapped to the F-Keys to make the use of those characters easier for the artist who can switch between individual sets of characters via basic keyboard short cuts. PabloDraw is one of the very few special ASCII/ANSI art editors that were developed for MS Windows XP.

Image to text conversion

Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to text characters, 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.
   Examples of converted images is given below.
   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.
   Since the appearance of the first simple converter tools, individuals have converted images to ASCII art automatically and afterwards claimed that they generated the result themselves "by Hand" via a text editor.
   Images that were converted to text, where no touch up work was done after the conversion, can in almost every cases be identified as such, at least by an experienced text artist. The detection of converted, software generated text art becomes much harder, if some time was spent by the fraudster to touch up as much as possible of details that are typical indications that it was auto-generated by software and not drawn by hand as claimed. The inconsistencies in the way "shading" was done in just one art piece is often what gives the fraudster away.

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 unrecognizable 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're not as universally accessible since they're usually relatively font-specific.

Animated ASCII art

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.
Contemporary web browser revitalized animated ASCII art again. It became possible to display animated ASCII art via JavaScript or Java applets. Static ASCII art pictures are loaded and displayed one after another, creating the animation, very similar to how movie projectors unreel film reel and project the individual pictures on the big screen at movie theatres. A new term was born: ASCIImation - another name of Animated ASCII Art. A seminal work in this arena is the Star Wars ASCIImation. More complicated routines in JavaScript generate more elaborate ASCIImations showing effects like Morphing effects, star field emulations, fading effects and calculated images, such as mandelbrot fractal animations. There are now many tools and programs that can transform raster images into text symbols; some of these tools can operate on streaming video. For example, the music video for pop singer Beck Hansen's song "Black Tambourine" is made up entirely of ASCII characters that approximate the original footage.

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 is known as the line drawing characters or pseudo-graphics.

ANSI art

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're 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've become far less common since Windows GUI text editors (using the Windows ANSI code page) have largely replaced DOS based ones. ... more.

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, for example 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, making a complicated picture.

Overprinting (surprint)

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) can't 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's possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color

ASCII art programs

List of Text Editors / ASCII artFurther Information

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