

Show HN: ANSI art renderer in JavaScript/Canvas - atdt
http://atdt.github.com/escapes.js/

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tptacek
Ok, time for someone to do a Javascript version of TheDRAW.

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atdt
If you can get past the naivete, there is a lot of really wonderful ANSI art
up on <http://sixteencolors.net>. The severe constraints of the medium
inspired ANSI artists to exploit perspective and color theory to create the
illusion of detail. Check out artpacks from ACiD, iCE and DARK from the mid
90s, for example. There is also, of course, a lot of amateurish juvenilia, but
even that has its own charm.

~~~
comatose_kid
ATH1

~~~
atdt
NO CARRIER

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there
I was doing some ANSI art stuff a few months ago and made a BDF font of the
original DOS 437 codepage font, so I could view BBSes and ANSI art properly in
xterm. I converted it to TrueType so it would also work in Terminal.app:

<https://github.com/jcs/ansiterm>

The TrueType version was easily converted to a WOFF font so, after writing an
ANSI-escape-code-to-HTML parser, I could render ANSI art in most modern
browsers with just normal HTML:

<http://jcs.org/tmp/go-east/index.html>

(HTML version on the left, static PNG exported from ACiDDraw on the right)

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endgame
I wrote libfake437 (<http://libfake437.googlecode.com>) to create this effect
in SDL, but your version is cooler and more general. Does it draw the low
characters (smiley faces and stuff) correctly?

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there
Yes, it draws every character properly.

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justinlau
Awesome. Good times, good memories. Lots of my BBSing was done on slower
modems, though - it would be cool if you could render them as an animated GIF
with regions slowly typing into view... :)

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treeface
Not sure if you're aware, but the big "fork me on github" link at the top
right isn't pointing at github.com/atdt, it's pointing at github.com/you.

~~~
atdt
Eep, thanks. Fixed.

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arrakeen
similarly, i wrote an XPM renderer in javascript:
<https://github.com/bsdf/libxpm.js>

