
Ascii art – dead or alive? - daftpanda
https://blog.sourcerer.io/ascii-art-dead-or-alive-cc237391e5d8
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monokai_nl
That's interesting. I just experimented with a sort of ascii scroll dither
effect on my personal site: [https://www.monokai.nl](https://www.monokai.nl)

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iamdave
Oh it's you! I love the monokai scheme to the point where it's part of my
ritualistic backup of ~ and has it's own dotdir.

Thank you! :)

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monokai_nl
Hah! Glad you like it. Honored to be part of your dot files :)

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AnnoyingSwede
This written piece must the shortest and briefest to make it to the hackernews
first page. No mention about the demo-groups, e-zines, file_id.diz's, crackers
NFO files, the evolution of animation in ANSI, not to mention how a fraction
of it continued in the RIP format. #fakeascii

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vog
Don't forget the animated ASCII art, aka ASCIImations, which is a large field
in itself.

\- The most popular ASCIImation is the famous Star Wars fan art:
[http://www.asciimation.co.nz/](http://www.asciimation.co.nz/)

\- I created some of my own when I was a child, which I later polished and
published: [http://asciimation.de](http://asciimation.de)

\- Finally, there is the BB demo: [http://aa-
project.sourceforge.net/bb/](http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/)

\- BB on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubDqdV2r9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubDqdV2r9k)

\- BB essentially demonstrates the capabilities of the general-purpose
realtime ASCII art engine "AAlib": [http://aa-
project.sourceforge.net/](http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/)

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aepiepaey
Better video for BB:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLlDt_4EGX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLlDt_4EGX4).

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vog
Good point. Thanks!

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robin_reala
It’s easy to forgot how prevalent ASCII art was. W3C’s Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines from ’99 specifically call it out as a problem, and
have examples of ASCII art charts(!) that will need alternative text for
screen-reader users: [https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#ascii-
art](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#ascii-art)

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venamresm__
Fellow ascii artist reporting in. Check out
[http://pc.textmod.es/](http://pc.textmod.es/)
[http://bbs.ninja/](http://bbs.ninja/) There are still a lot of ascii art
compo going on in the demoscene.

There's some good history here:
[http://www.chris.com/ascii/joan/www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/...](http://www.chris.com/ascii/joan/www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/history.html)

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edem
There is a cool gallery of ascii art
[here]([http://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/gallery.html](http://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/gallery.html)).
I think that ASCII still has a place today. Roguelike games for example
usually have ASCII art. Take a look at the [Roguelike
dev]([https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/](https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/))
Reddit for example.

Note that I'm not the owner of the subreddit I'm just a user.

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Kyzrati
Ah yes the owner would be me, and I really have to get around to releasing a
new version of REXPaint xD. Lots of potential feature ideas, and it's cool to
have to many people using this little tool I originally made for my own
projects!

I've also already got a little backlog of great art by users from recent weeks
that I still need to add to the gallery...

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boyter
It certainly is not dead. One example I can think of that uses it as an art
style for a game is Stone Story RPG
[https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42354.0](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42354.0)
which has some of the prettiest ASCII art I have ever seen.

~~~
JoshMnem
Also Sanctuary RPG:

[http://www.sanctuaryrpg.com/](http://www.sanctuaryrpg.com/)

Unfortunately, they only run on Windows, not Linux. They are missing out on a
large audience that likes text-based things.

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reedum
It does run in wine. I have been playing it this way for a while.

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nathan_long
I don't call it "art", but I've been putting textual diagrams into
documentation lately, and I think it can be very helpful.

For example, I added a diagram to the Phoenix Channels guide, showing how the
implementation works:
[https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/master/guid...](https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/master/guides/docs/channels.md#overview)

I use Monodraw
([https://monodraw.helftone.com/](https://monodraw.helftone.com/)), which lets
you work with boxes, arrows, etc as objects in layers, and export to ASCII or
Unicode. ASCIIFlow ([http://asciiflow.com/](http://asciiflow.com/)) is a
simpler alternative.

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Gracana
Your ascii diagram wraps terribly on an 80 column screen, which is the typical
width for a text display.

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craigds
If you live in the 80s.

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sowbug
Depends on whether you consider the extra columns to be yours or those of your
audience. If they're yours, use them however you want. If they're your
audience's, then stick to the 80-column standard so your readers can tile
standard-sized windows the way _they_ want on their large monitors.

Especially important for side-by-side code diffs.

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doppp
Be sure to check out Cogmind
([http://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/)).
A more modern ASCII take on roguelikes.

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arachnophobe
I've been messing around with converting videos to ASCII for a side project -
it's been a fun learning experience. Obviously I don't think ASCII art's going
any where...

[https://youtu.be/oRdrMM20keI](https://youtu.be/oRdrMM20keI)

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m_t
Do you know about libcaca?
[http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca](http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca)

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arachnophobe
I didn't - I'd started off converting the videos to 8-bit colouring and in the
process was experimenting with pixelisation and went off on a fairly extreme
bit of a tangent.

[https://youtu.be/MZ1fZWa2I8w](https://youtu.be/MZ1fZWa2I8w)

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cicero
Back in the late 1970s, I was doing Baudot[1] art using teletypes and paper
tape, exchanging pictures over amateur radio. My magnum opus was an R2-D2
image that was about 8" x 15". Although it lacked depth, it was very detailed.
We had a drawer full of paper tape rolls in zip-lock bags containing the
various pictures we had collected over the air. I wish I had somehow
transferred them to computer files and preserved them as we were transitioning
away from the mechanical teletypes to the Apple II.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code)

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stultus
I think it is time for more unicode art. ASCII is so old generation.

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drdeadringer
Although I'm sure I encountered ASCII art years beforehand, my first time
encountering it "in the media" was watching the film "Me and You and Everyone
We Know" in theater.

Since then I've enjoyed the ASCII art I've encountered, from "hype trains" to
"thumbs up". I find it fun to see.

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upofadown
>ASCII pictures don’t display correctly when the viewer is using proportional
fonts — and a huge number of people (perhaps most) are using proportional
fonts.

These days things are actually pretty good. Most things will manage to display
plain text properly if there is enough context to allow the distinction to be
made.

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earenndil
It's not dead, but it's dying. For instance, the alt.ascii-art newsgroup I've
noticed just in the past year has gone down in terms of postings.

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gweinberg
Why do people say "ASCII art" instead of text art? It has never had anything
to do with ASCII, as the author acknowledges several times.

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qbrass
Because when you hear ASCII art, it rings a bell.

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trisimix
I love and use ascii art everywhere. Its one of my very few design choices
that Ive actually delved into as a cs major.

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perlpimp
for adventurous there is [http://asciipr0n.com](http://asciipr0n.com) NSFW.
there also an irc channel #asciipr0n associated with this cyberpunk
minicommunity.

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doug1001
nice one

fire up the redis server--you'll see some ascii art there

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tobyhinloopen
brew install cowsay

