Ascii art – dead or alive? | Hacker News Reader

Ascii art – dead or alive?

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99 pointsdaftpanda39 comments

That's interesting. I just experimented with a sort of ascii scroll dither effect on my personal site: https://www.monokai.nl

That is so much fun. And my eyes thank you for the years of fine hues!

That effect is so pretty!

Oh it's you! I love the monokai scheme to the point where it's part of my ritualistic backup of ~ and has it's own dotdir.

Thank you! :)

Hah! Glad you like it. Honored to be part of your dot files :)

It's not exactly an ASCII art dither, since the dither effect appears to be applied to each individual character But it is cool and interesting, and reminds me of Pac-Man 256.

This written piece must the shortest and briefest to make it to the hackernews first page. No mention about the demo-groups, e-zines, file_id.diz's, crackers NFO files, the evolution of animation in ANSI, not to mention how a fraction of it continued in the RIP format. #fakeascii

It’s easy to forgot how prevalent ASCII art was. W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from ’99 specifically call it out as a problem, and have examples of ASCII art charts(!) that will need alternative text for screen-reader users: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#ascii-art

Don't forget the animated ASCII art, aka ASCIImations, which is a large field in itself.

- The most popular ASCIImation is the famous Star Wars fan art: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/

- I created some of my own when I was a child, which I later polished and published: http://asciimation.de

- Finally, there is the BB demo: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/

- BB on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubDqdV2r9k

- BB essentially demonstrates the capabilities of the general-purpose realtime ASCII art engine "AAlib": http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/

Better video for BB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLlDt_4EGX4.

Good point. Thanks!

There is a cool gallery of ascii art [here](http://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/gallery.html). I think that ASCII still has a place today. Roguelike games for example usually have ASCII art. Take a look at the [Roguelike dev](https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/) Reddit for example.

Note that I'm not the owner of the subreddit I'm just a user.

Also see the editor used for creating the art in that gallery: http://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

Ah yes the owner would be me, and I really have to get around to releasing a new version of REXPaint xD. Lots of potential feature ideas, and it's cool to have to many people using this little tool I originally made for my own projects!

I've also already got a little backlog of great art by users from recent weeks that I still need to add to the gallery...

Fellow ascii artist reporting in. Check out http://pc.textmod.es/ http://bbs.ninja/ There are still a lot of ascii art compo going on in the demoscene.

There's some good history here: http://www.chris.com/ascii/joan/www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/...

It certainly is not dead. One example I can think of that uses it as an art style for a game is Stone Story RPG https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42354.0 which has some of the prettiest ASCII art I have ever seen.

Also Sanctuary RPG:

http://www.sanctuaryrpg.com/

Unfortunately, they only run on Windows, not Linux. They are missing out on a large audience that likes text-based things.

It does run in wine. I have been playing it this way for a while.

I don't call it "art", but I've been putting textual diagrams into documentation lately, and I think it can be very helpful.

For example, I added a diagram to the Phoenix Channels guide, showing how the implementation works: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/master/guid...

I use Monodraw (https://monodraw.helftone.com/), which lets you work with boxes, arrows, etc as objects in layers, and export to ASCII or Unicode. ASCIIFlow (http://asciiflow.com/) is a simpler alternative.

Your ascii diagram wraps terribly on an 80 column screen, which is the typical width for a text display.

If you live in the 80s.

Depends on whether you consider the extra columns to be yours or those of your audience. If they're yours, use them however you want. If they're your audience's, then stick to the 80-column standard so your readers can tile standard-sized windows the way they want on their large monitors.

Especially important for side-by-side code diffs.

Your art looks great on linux, but looks terrible on Chrome on Windows. All the line art is misaligned.

Be sure to check out Cogmind (http://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/). A more modern ASCII take on roguelikes.

I've been messing around with converting videos to ASCII for a side project - it's been a fun learning experience. Obviously I don't think ASCII art's going any where...

https://youtu.be/oRdrMM20keI

Do you know about libcaca? http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

I didn't - I'd started off converting the videos to 8-bit colouring and in the process was experimenting with pixelisation and went off on a fairly extreme bit of a tangent.

https://youtu.be/MZ1fZWa2I8w

Back in the late 1970s, I was doing Baudot[1] art using teletypes and paper tape, exchanging pictures over amateur radio. My magnum opus was an R2-D2 image that was about 8" x 15". Although it lacked depth, it was very detailed. We had a drawer full of paper tape rolls in zip-lock bags containing the various pictures we had collected over the air. I wish I had somehow transferred them to computer files and preserved them as we were transitioning away from the mechanical teletypes to the Apple II.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

I think it is time for more unicode art. ASCII is so old generation.

Although I'm sure I encountered ASCII art years beforehand, my first time encountering it "in the media" was watching the film "Me and You and Everyone We Know" in theater.

Since then I've enjoyed the ASCII art I've encountered, from "hype trains" to "thumbs up". I find it fun to see.

>ASCII pictures don’t display correctly when the viewer is using proportional fonts — and a huge number of people (perhaps most) are using proportional fonts.

These days things are actually pretty good. Most things will manage to display plain text properly if there is enough context to allow the distinction to be made.

It's not dead, but it's dying. For instance, the alt.ascii-art newsgroup I've noticed just in the past year has gone down in terms of postings.

Why do people say "ASCII art" instead of text art? It has never had anything to do with ASCII, as the author acknowledges several times.

It probably sounds more computer-ey.

Because when you hear ASCII art, it rings a bell.

I love and use ascii art everywhere. Its one of my very few design choices that Ive actually delved into as a cs major.

for adventurous there is http://asciipr0n.com NSFW. there also an irc channel #asciipr0n associated with this cyberpunk minicommunity.

nice one

fire up the redis server--you'll see some ascii art there

brew install cowsay

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