ASCII Art: From a Commodity into an Obscurity | Hacker News Reader

ASCII Art: From a Commodity into an Obscurity

blog.glyphdrawing.club

49 pointscalifornia-og37 comments

I still dabble in ASCII art a bit, mostly in HTML comments and email headers. It’s kind of a difficult art-form to practice now, given that monospaced text is relatively rare.

Here’s are my pets in ASCII, who go out in the headers of my emails:

                                 .-"-.
       ^...^        |\./|       /|^ ^|\
      (=^I^=) ))   =(^,^)=))   {/(_O_)\}
       / " \ ((      | | ((     _/ ^ \_))
      ( |"| )))     (|||)))    (/ /'\ \)
      ==m m==       =m'm=       ""' '""

I love m'colleague dwimmer's text art: https://www.instagram.com/dwimmertxt/

He hand-crafted animated text art for a game project [1], which I had the pleasure to implement [2].

   ⎠(  ⎠/⎞⎜  ⎠⎞  ⎟⎟  ⎛(  ⎞⎞⎛⎛ ⎠⎛⎞ \ ⎞ ᾆ῎ϔᾧᾗ ⎛ /  ⎛⎝  ⎞⎞⎛⎛  ⎠⎛⎝  ⎜⎜ ⎛⎛⎝
   ⎝‿)    ⎝ (‿⎠  ⎟⎛  ⎝‿) ⎟⎟⎜⎜ ⎝‿⎠  ⎞⎟ ⎜;ἷˈɮ ⎜⎛   ⎝‿) ⎟⎟⎜⎜  ⎝‿⎠  ⎞⎜ ⎝‿⎠
    Ɣ        Ɣ    \   Ɣ  ⎠/⎞⎜  Ɣ   ⎟⎟ ⎜.¡ ⎟ ⎜⎜    Ɣ  ⎟⎛\⎝   Ɣ   /   Ɣ
  ζ⅋ɧℌ¸    ҁᾯ¡ҩℷ    ʧ₧℘ҩ¸   ⎝ζ⅋ɧℌ¸ ⎟⎛ ⎜ ʖ ⎟ ⎞⎜ ʧ₧℘ҩ¸⎠   ζ⅋ɧℌ¸   ҁᾯ¡ҩ
  ᾆ῟¡₰ᾗ    ᾆ῎ϔᾧᾗ    Ḉἧ℃'ῒ   ᾆ῟¡₰ᾗ   \{ìɨʉɨí}/  Ḉἧ℃'ῒ    ᾆ῟¡₰ᾗ    ᾆ῎ϔᾧ
  ⎜¸ƾ῟ἷ    ⎜;ἷˈɮ    ⎜Ҹ῏῝ʖ    ⎜¸ƾ῟ἷ    )ˊ⁀ˋ(     ⎜Ҹ῏῝ʖ    ⎜¸ƾ῟ἷ    ⎜;ἷ

[1] Hanukkah of Data https://hanukkah.bluebird.sh/5784/

[2] I wrote about the process here: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/

Wait... That's not ASCII!

Neither is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but no one blinks at that kind of text art anymore. Unicode is everywhere--even if not all glyphs are supported, the vast majority of the BMP is. ASCII-only art is a relic like trigraphs. Also note that most ASCII art is actually CP437 or "extended ASCII", so it was never even pure ASCII in the first place.

True, it is unicode.

I would argue text art evolved with the, ah, Times.

If anything, crafting with unicode brings its own set of challenges alongside those of old skool ASCII art. A bigger character palette, yes, but also variable character widths. Composing is less obvious.

Your remark prompted me to look up the Wikipedia page for ASCII art, and according to that page, unicode is indeed the "new skool" of the form. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art#Unicode

That said, I'm hardly an artist and present this as my layperson's understanding.

ASCII art (in slightly different form) was around before the 1990s.

Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)

When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know how old they were.

(1) https://petapixel.com/2012/07/20/atari-compugraph-foto-an-as...

There is the famous Fortran Snoopy calendar from the end of the 60s (written in Fortran 66). https://gunkies.org/wiki/Snoopy_Calendar

ASCII art also played a big role in the early video walkthrough world too. Back then, sites like GameFAQs only accepted plain text documents for their guides, so ASCII art was the only way to add any form of images or decorations to your work, and make them look more interesting than a giant wall of text.

So the folks who wrote 50,000 word guides to the latest Zelda or Final Fantasy game also usually ended up becoming pretty good as ASCII art too.

Unfortunately, this era also died for various reasons. Most notably, the world of text based guides and simple message boards got replaced by a mix of wikis and sites that could actually support images, as well as video walkthroughs on sites like YouTube.

So when the relevance of GameFAQs and its ilk faded, so did the importance of ASCII art.

Found somewhere on stackoverflow many years ago and being my shell banner ever since:

    .-------.
    |  Hi   |
    '-------'
        ^      (\_/)
        '----- (O.o)
               (> <)

With judicious use of VT100 codes and sleep(), you can do animation as well:

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    from time import sleep

    def width():
        while True:
            yield from range(3, 11)
            yield from range(9, 1, -1)

    print('(\\___/)\n(>O.o<)\n(>[||]<)\n(")_(")')
    for w in width():
        l = '(>[' + w * '|' + ']<)'
        print(f'\x1b7\x1b[2A\x1b[K{l}\x1b8', end='', flush=True)
        sleep(0.1)

At least as long as situtations exist where communication is restricted to characters, character art will persist.

                 ___          ______
                /__/\     ___/_____/\          FrobTech, Inc.
                \  \ \   /         /\\
                 \  \ \_/__       /  \         "If you've got the job,
                 _\  \ \  /\_____/___ \         we've got the frob."
                // \__\/ /  \       /\ \
        _______//_______/    \     / _\/______
       /      / \       \    /    / /        /\
    __/      /   \       \  /    / /        / _\__
   / /      /     \_______\/    / /        / /   /\
  /_/______/___________________/ /________/ /___/  \
  \ \      \    ___________    \ \        \ \   \  /
   \_\      \  /          /\    \ \        \ \___\/
      \      \/          /  \    \ \        \  /
       \_____/          /    \    \ \________\/
            /__________/      \    \  /
            \   _____  \      /_____\/       This .signature gratuitously
             \ /    /\  \    / \  \ \        refers to k
              /____/  \  \  /   \  \ \                   i
              \    \  /___\/     \  \ \                    b
               \____\/            \__\/                      o

Yes and no. Mostly no, I think.

In a lot of cases (most?) even plain-text email is rendered in proportional fonts which don’t work for ASCII art.

The default for all mobile email clients, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail is now to render plain-text in proportional. Those who get it monospaced have chosen to do that. It’s also made worse by Outlook’s insistence on removing ‘extra’ linebreaks by default. AFAIK, there’s no way to switch off that behaviour except email-by-email, and you can’t know if your recipient has it or not.

There is still one place it's guaranteed to work, code.

I have occasionally used small ASCII based diagrams inside comment blocks where it felt appropriate and it works very nicely... I'm not a big documentation inside code guy, but like to include it sparingly for the most unobvious code.

Limited to more utilitarian "art", but it at least is guaranteed to work, I've never seen or heard of anyone successfully using proportional fonts for programming (although I have seen people try).

> There is still one place it's guaranteed to work, code.

No. If somebody (a color theme) uses italic text for comments, ASCII arts breaks.

> by Outlook’s insistence on removing ‘extra’ linebreaks by default

And screw that - any idea why it does so?

I like to believe MSFT is a publicly funded psych experiment to see how far Stockholm syndrome can go while still being profitable.

Emojis are characters (consist of Unicode scalar values).

Is there a chip tune to go with this?

Could using ASCII Art in the 21st century be said to be letting one's geek flag fly?

  ### ,d88b.d88b,  +-------+
   #  88888888888  | ASCII |
   #  `Y8888888Y'  |       |
   #   `Y888Y'     |  Art  |
  ###    `Y'       +-------+

It's weird for me to se an article about a visual subject without a single screenshot about the thing it's writing about.

Just one moment before seeing this, I was looking at a large example (too big for a phone) on a NH user profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=some_furry

Ah, the Old Days, when life was simple and adulting was my parent's problem.

Looks fine in Chrome's desktop mode on a phone.

Just wanted to mention my favorite ASCII art ever - Simon Jansen's monumental ASCII art version of Star Wars from the late 1990s. Comes with a great FAQ as a bonus.

https://www.asciimation.co.nz/

When did Unicode become popular on the internet? The article seems to claim it was around since the transition from BBSes started in 1995.

Also, a contributing factor to the decline not mentioned is the prevalence of non-monospace fonts.

It was around in the 90s (Java, Windows NT) but didn't hit its stride in documents until utf8 was created and took over, maybe five or ten years later.

Used this[1] for over twenty years for random things. An easy way to make quick text into different forms of ASCII art. I find it easier than using the `figlet`[2] command.

1. http://patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Graffiti&t=Hac...

2. http://www.figlet.org

Wow, a reference to Legowelt and his cyberzine. Nice! http://www.legowelt.org/shadowwolfissue1.html

I love ASCII art so much; my very first experience with computers was a DOS program that printed ASCII art pictures on my family's dot matrix printer. I could not even read yet and I was entranced.

My most upvoted ASCII art on HN. The Van Halen logo, RIP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24703707

My favorite source http://www.asciiartfarts.com/

I still use aamath, it's faster than anything else and formulae will be read everywhere.

(2018)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The katakana tsu along with the high horizontal bar makes that unicode art. I guess ^\_(''/)_/^ is valid ASCII ART although kinda looks like the guy's getting robbed.

I was too subtle, sorry

UNICODE, while it includes ASCII, now ubiquitous, is what the layman considers as text art now and far into the future.

It's not ubiquitous. I'm seeing a square "undefined character" glyph in the above example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com