Show HN: MoebiusXBIN – ASCII and text-mode art editor with custom font support | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MoebiusXBIN – ASCII and text-mode art editor with custom font support

blog.glyphdrawing.club

I've encountered SAUCE, long since; but the page is right. I've personally never directly encountered XBIN, and it does seem that it did not take off as predicted.

* https://acid.org/images/0896/XBIN.TXT

The world does not seem to have managed to do for text (art image) files what TIFF did for graphics files. Although https://16colo.rs/ , recently on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665816) seems to be getting by on just SAUCE plus FILE_ID.DIZ.

See https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove#features , for one example of what we have instead. (-:

I would have quipped that someone has yet to have the idea of using JSON instead of these directly-machine-readable binary formats. But the DurDraw developers have indeed done that very thing.

* https://github.com/cmang/durdraw/blob/master/durformat.md

SAUCE has proven quite resilient and adaptable. I don't think it really works for describing newer developments like like Utf-8, 256 color or RGB ANSI art. It maybe misses some vintage platforms like ATASCII. But that could change with a format update. For MS-DOS and Amiga ANSI art packs, and some nicher formats like Xbin, it's pretty standard.

XBIN files have been scattered around artscene packs since the 90s, but since it is directly tied to VGA hardware, it remains niche. Some people really like it. I have always found it tricky to work with.

I like to think the DUR (durdraw) format can be adopted or extended to describe most text art, though custom font support like Xbin is not in the current version. I also like to think that DUR's JSON core makes it easier for mortals and programmers to play with than SAUCE's dense binary format (and ANSI escape codes, even), but that's a bit subjective.

I had written a program which can convert between XBIN, ANSI, MZM, and other formats, including support for doorway mode in ANSI files (most ANSI art programs do not support doorway mode). This could be used together with MoebiusXBIN or other programs in order to convert them to/from the formats that you will use with other programs. (I had also considered to add a DER-based format later, in case of other features wanted to be included as well, such as animations, character set mapping (including mapping to TRON code and to other character codes), etc; however, this might or might not actually be made.)

Heikki is awesome!

And be sure to check out https://16colo.rs/ as well if you are into this kind of art.

One neat thing about XBIN btw is that it is based on what a real VGA chip can do, so you can show XBIN art in text mode on a real physical x86-computer. No need for computationally heavy linear frame buffers here.. :)

Very cool. The TES-SYMB5 font seems to be quite something.

Indeed. It’s like a leet version of Unicode’s “Symbols for Legacy Computing” block.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_for_Legacy_Computing

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