ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to [|text-based visual 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 such as Courier or Consolas for presentation.
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the
creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
ASCII art was invented, in large part, 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 banner pages, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
History
Typewriter art
Since 1867, typewriters have been used for creating visual art. Typists could find guides in books or magazines with instructions on how to type portraits or other depictions.TTY and RTTY
TTY stands for "TeleTYpe" or "TeleTYpewriter", and is also known as Teleprinter or Teletype.RTTY stands for Radioteletype; character sets such as Baudot code, which predated ASCII, were used. According to a chapter in the "RTTY Handbook", text images have been sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923. However, none of the "old" RTTY art has been discovered yet. What is known is that text images appeared frequently on radioteletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.
Line-printer art
In the 1960s, Andries van Dam published a representation of an electronic circuit produced on an IBM 1403 line printer. At the same time, Kenneth Knowlton was producing realistic images, also on line printers, by overprinting several characters on top of one another.Note that it was not ASCII art in a sense that the 1403 was driven by an EBCDIC-coded platform and the character sets and trains available on the 1403 were derived from EBCDIC rather than ASCII, despite some glyphs commonalities.
ASCII art
The widespread 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.An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic which uses ASCII text to create images. In place of images in a regular comic, ASCII art is used, with the text or dialog usually placed underneath.
During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts became increasingly popular, leading to a decline in ASCII art. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUDs, an acronym for "Multi-User Dungeon",, Internet Relay Chat, Email, message boards, and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.
ASCII art is seen to this day on the CLI app Neofetch, which displays the logo of the OS on which it is invoked.
ANSI
ASCII and more importantly, ANSI were staples of the early technological era; terminal systems relied on coherent presentation using color and control signals standard in the terminal protocols.Over the years, warez groups began to enter the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release.nfo files with their software, cracks or other general software reverse-engineering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the warez group's name and maybe some ASCII borders on the outsides of the release notes, etc.
Uses
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, teleprinters, non-graphic computer terminals, printer separators, in early computer networking, email, 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.Some electronic schematic archives represent the circuits using ASCII art.
Examples of ASCII-style art predating the modern computer era can be found in the June 1939, July 1948 and October 1948 editions of Popular Mechanics.
Early mainframe games played on terminals frequently used ASCII art to simulate graphics, most notably the roguelike genre using ASCII art to visually represent dungeons and monsters within them. The Kroz series of roguelikes for MS-DOS uses ASCII art. 0verkill is a 2D platform multiplayer shooter game designed entirely in color ASCII art.
MPlayer and VLC media player can display videos as ASCII art through the AAlib library.
Many game walkthrough guides come as part of a basic.txt file; this file often contains the name of the game in ASCII art.
Types and styles
Different techniques could be used in ASCII art to obtain different artistic effects."Typewriter-style" lettering, made from individual letter characters:
Line art, for creating shapes:
.--. /\ ____
'--' /__\ ~ <>
Solid art, for creating filled objects:
.g@8g. db
'Y8@P' d88b
Shading, using symbols with various intensities for creating gradients or contrasts:
:$#$: "4b. ':.
:$#$: "4b. ':.
Combinations of the above, often used as signatures, for example, at the end of an email:
|\_/| ****************************
/ @ @ \ * "Purrrfectly pleasant" *
* Poppy Prinz * _
`>>x<<´ * *
/ O \ ****************************
As-pixel characters use combinations of ░, █, ▄, ▀, and/or ⣿, ⣴, ⢁, etc to make pictures:
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⠿⠿⠿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣾⣿⣷⣦⣌⠙⢿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⡈⢻⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⠋⣉⠙⢻⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡷⢀⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣼⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣶⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⠁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⠀⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣧⡈⠻⢿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⡟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣶⣶⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
Emoticons
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 kaomojiMore complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures. Hundreds of different text smileys have developed over time, but only a few are generally accepted, used and understood.
ASCII comic
An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic.The Adventures of Nerd Boy
'The Adventures of Nerd Boy', or just 'Nerd Boy', was an ASCII comic, published by Joaquim Gândara between 5 August 2001 and 17 July 2007, and consisting of 600 strips. They were posted to ASCII art newsgroup alt.ascii-art and on the website. Some strips have been translated to Polish and French.Styles of the computer underground text art scene
Atari 400/800 ATASCII
The Atari 400/800, which were released in 1979, did not follow the ASCII standard and had their own character set, called ATASCII. The emergence of ATASCII art coincided with the growing popularity of BBS Systems caused by availability of the acoustic couplers that were compatible with the 8-bit home computers. ATASCII text animations are also referred to as "break animations" by the Atari sceners.C-64 PETSCII
The Commodore 64, which was released in 1982, also did not follow the ASCII standard. The C-64 character set is called PETSCII, an extended form of ASCII-1963. As with the Atari's ATASCII art, C-64 fans developed a similar scene that used PETSCII for their creations."Block ASCII" / "High ASCII" style ASCII art on the IBM PC
So-called "block ASCII" or "high ASCII" uses the extended characters of the 8-bit code page 437, which is a proprietary standard introduced by IBM in 1979 for the IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS operating systems. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform. Until then, "block ASCIIs" dominated the PC Text Art Scene.The first art scene group that focused on the extended character set of the PC in their artwork was called "Aces of ANSI Art", or. Some members left in 1990 and formed a group called "ANSI Creators in Demand", or ACiD. In that same year the second major underground art scene group "Insane Creators Enterprise", or ICE, was founded.
There is some debate between ASCII and block ASCII artists, with "Hardcore" ASCII artists maintaining that block ASCII art is in fact not ASCII art, because it does not use the 128 characters of the original ASCII standard. On the other hand, block ASCII artists argue that if their art uses only characters of the computer's character set, then it is to be called ASCII, regardless if the character set is proprietary or not.
Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard x3.16. One can view block ASCIIs with a text editor using the font "Terminal", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI viewer, such as ACiDView for Windows, one can see block ASCII and ANSI files properly. An example that [|illustrates the difference] in appearance is part of this article. Alternatively, one could look at the file using the TYPE command in the command prompt.