#Ascii art easy code

Compare it to the diagonal stroke on top for example, which is displayed using ”. The shape of the L perfectly fits this location of the original image. The diagonal stroke is displayed using a capital L, which automatically creates a diagonal line towards the right bottom. No problem.Īpplying this subpixel technique to an image, in this case a white k on a black background, shows the advantages of this new technique. A dark grey pixel will be converted into a glyph with a large surface (for example while a light grey pixel will become a character with a small surface, for example a punctuation mark like the comma. While converting a pixel based image into text, the greyscale value of the pixel will correspond with the greyscale value of the glyph. Every letter within a font has a certain greyscale value. The traditional way of creating ASCII art is simple and straightforward. Same simplicity, but much more precise results. This is why we imagined to develop “subpixel ASCII art”. However, current technology allows for much more advanced ASCII art than in the 1970s. But ASCII art is still alive as ever, at least in our own studio. ASCII art itself has been declared dead by Microsoft in 1998, in favour of other formats like JPG and GIF and the promotion of proportional fonts. Meanwhile ASCII itself has been surpassed by Unicode. Nice improvements, but bad for the ASCII art movement. When computers progressed in the 1990s, more possibilities became available, the graphics improved and more non-monospaced fonts became at user’s disposal. This method later on developed into photos which were automatically converted to letters, currently known as the most common form of ASCII art around. The easiest way to create a picture back then, was to build it up out of letters yourself. In the early computer days support for pictures was limited. The limitations of the early computer days were an important factor of the success of ASCII art. But the early, should we say original ASCII art was plain black and white and strongly characterised by heavy limitations. Some more recent ways of creating ASCII art also include colours for example. The danger herby lies in the possibility that based on the practise of the person (designer or artist) the answers could be yes but also no.ĪSCII art is a versatile art, any possible image can be used, and meanwhile there are also several versions of ASCII art. But at the same moment we can also just approach it the other way around, and ask ourselves if ASCII art is actually a good name for what it is. Why didn't they call it ASCII design? The situation could be of course clarified by finding out who coined the term, and what was the deeper meaning behind. And approaching it from a more formal perspective: ASCII art was invented and applied primarily by designers & computer nerds.

The act of using letters for something they are not made for. While looking closer at the name itself - ASCII art - the question arises, what's the art within ASCII art: the result as such, or perhaps much more the process behind. If you say ASCII art, you automatically say monospaced fonts. This matches the text directly with the pixels. The uniform width allows for a pixel grid of a complete text paragraph. This kind of visual art is not just made with any font, but with monospaced fonts. And not any possible letter, but just one of the 128 letters which are part of a character set called ASCII. For the younger generation not known with ASCII art (logically, that’s a pre-internet thing): ASCII art is an image displayed using letters. Originally started as an underground movement, but not much later a major hit.

#Ascii art easy code

When the character encoding standard “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” was introduced in 1963, hardly anybody could foresee that a little more than a decade later the world would loose itself in an early digital hype: ASCII art. Case study: From ASCII Art to Subpixel ASCII+ Art