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Comment by nibbula | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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