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Comment by kyberias | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit unclear why this exists. It seems to combine glyphs from 8-bit computers and place them in Unicode space even though the standard doesn't define many of them.

I guess the reason is to be able to combine them in some "art".

Perhaps those missing code points could be added by the Consortium based on this feedback.

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> some ”art”

Eh, text art is a venerable art form as old as teletypes.

Older than that, even.

It goes back at least to typewriter days. The women in the typing pools of large companies would make these and post them on the pin boards.

Imagine the kind of abstract thinking it took to do ASCII art with no delete key!

If the terms "PETSCII", "Amiga ASCII" and "ANSI art" do not mean anything to you, then this font and what can be rendered with it will be completely meaningless to you and you will be confused like you are. You had to have experienced it to appreciate it, which you do not apoear to have. A shame, really, since you missed out on a lot of cool art.

I think for many people this here doesn't mean anything. I'm having a really hard time understanding what is going on in the comments and on the post itself and I've just settled with "it's something about ascii art on terminals" and that's it. Probably has uses. But don't dismiss the confusion on lots of people since this appears to be target at older folks.

One can render ASCII art or even "poor man's graphics" in any text editor regardless of their age. Yes it's dated, but if one is working anywhere near physical equipmet like terminal concentrators hooked up to servers' serial ports, one quickly learns to appreciate graphic approximations of windows with just ASCII characters.

The rest like Amiga ASCII art from Skid Row and PaRaDoX and the like... you missed out. It was a glorious childhood. It's hard to relate just how great it was owning a Commodore Amiga computer. The ASCII art in front of cracked games from the group who cracked them belong with that experience, and back in the day, it was mind-blowing. This font is a modern implementation of characters enabling that kind of art again, on modern systems, in programs like OpenOffice for example.

And the target is the cracking / demo scene, irrespective of age.

I have an Amiga and C64, so I'm very familiar with the art form. Again, I don't understand the value of combining them in one font. I can understand implementing each of the respective fonts as modern fonts, but not this.

With this font, you can use say OpenOffice to create the same kind of art while not needing the original systems and tools.

Well, I know it very well. I just don't understand why the ugly glyphs need to be combined into one font.

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