ASCII art
Encyclopedia
ASCII art is a graphic design
technique that uses computer
s for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters
defined by the ASCII
Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor
, and is often used with free-form language
s. Most examples of ASCII art
require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts
, as on a traditional typewriter
) such as Courier
for presentation.
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the
creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs
at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
The ASCII art phenomenon continues to exist in the social and mobile web, even when constrained to only 140 unicode
characters, as exhibited by Twitter
channels such as @TW1TT3Rart and many others, tagged as #TwitterArt and #140art.
In the 1954 short film Stamp Day for Superman
, typewriter art was a feature of the plot.
or Teletype.
RTTY stands for Radioteletype
; character sets such as Baudot code
, which predated ASCII, were used. According to a chapter in the "RTTY Handbook", text images have been sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923. However, none of the "old" RTTY art has been discovered yet. What is known is that text images appeared frequently on radioteletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.
The widespread usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The limitations of computers of that time period necessitated the use of text characters to represent images. Along with ASCII's use in communication, however, it also began to appear in the underground online art groups of the period. An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic which uses ASCII text to create images. In place of images in a regular comic, ASCII art is used, with the text or dialog usually placed underneath.
During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts
became increasingly popular, leading to a decline in ASCII art. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUD
s, an acronym for "Multi-User Dungeon", (which are textual multiplayer
role-playing video game
s), Internet Relay Chat
, E-mail
, message boards and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.
Over the years, warez
groups began to get into the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release .nfo
files with their software, cracks
or general illegal software reverse-engineering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the warez group's name and maybe some ASCII borders on the outsides of the release notes, etc.
ASCII art is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics, or in some cases, where the transmission of pictures is not possible. This includes typewriters, teleprinter
s, non-graphic computer terminal
s, printer separators, in early computer network
ing (e.g., BBSes
), e-mail
, and Usenet
news messages. ASCII art is also used within the source code
of computer programs for representation of company or product logos, and flow control or other diagrams. In some cases, the entire source code of a program is a piece of ASCII art — for instance, an entry to one of the earlier International Obfuscated C Code Contest
is a program that adds numbers, but visually looks like a binary adder drawn in logic ports.
Examples of ASCII-style art predating the modern computer era can be found in the June 1939, July 1948 and October 1948 editions of Popular Mechanics.
"0verkill" is a 2D platform multiplayer shooter game designed entirely in colour ASCII art. MPlayer
and VLC media player
can display videos as ASCII art. ASCII art is used in the making of DOS-based ZZT
games.
Many game walkthrough guides come as part of a basic .txt file; this file often contains the name of the game in ASCII art. Such as below, word art is created using backslashes and other ASCII values in order to create the illusion of 3D.
.--. /\
'--' /__\ (^._.^)~
- Line art, for creating shapes
.g@8g. db
'Y8@P' d88b
- Solid art, for creating filled shapes
:$#$: "4b. ':.
:$#$: "4b. ':.
- Shading, using different symbol density and shading for creating gradients or contrasts
|\_/| ****************************
/ @ @ \ * "Purrrfectly pleasant" *
( > º < ) * Poppy Prinz *
`»»x««´ * (pprinz@...) *
/ O \ ****************************
- combinations used as SIG (signature) at the end of an email
', 'smilie', or 'smiley
There is another type of one-line ASCII art that does not require the mental rotation of pictures, which is widely known in Japan as kaomoji (literally "face characters".) Traditionally, they are referred to as "ASCII face ".
More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures.
alt.ascii-art and on the website. Some strips have been translated to Polish
and French
.
did not follow the ASCII standard and had its own character set, called ATASCII
. The emergence of ATASCII art coincided with the growing popularity of BBS Systems
caused by availability of the acoustic coupler
s that were compatible with the 8-bit home computers. ATASCII text animations are also referred to as "break animations" by the Atari sceners.
, which was released in 1982, also did not follow the ASCII standard. The C-64 character set is called PETSCII
, an extended form of ASCII-1963
. As with the Atari's ATASCII art, C-64 fans developed a similar scene that used PETSCII for their creations.
So-called "block ASCII" or "high ASCII" uses the extended characters of the 8-bit code page 437
, which is a proprietary standard introduced by IBM
in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC and MS DOS operating system. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform. Until then, "block ASCIIs" dominated the PC Text Art Scene
.
The first art scene group that focused on the extended character set of the PC in their art work was called "Aces of ANSI Art," or "AAA." Some members of left in 1990, and formed a group called ACiD
, "ANSI Creators in Demand." In that same year the second major underground art scene group was founded, ICE
, "Insane Creators Enterprise".
There is some debate between ASCII and block ASCII artist, with "Hardcore" ASCII artists maintaining that block ASCII art is in fact not ANSI art
, because it does not use the 128 characters of the original ASCII standard. On the other hand, block ASCII artists argue that if their art uses only characters of the computers character set, then it is to be called ASCII, regardless if the character set is proprietary or not.
Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard
x3.16. One can view block ASCIIs with a text editor using the font "Terminal
", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI viewer, such as ACiDView for Windows (see ASCII and ANSI art viewers), one can see block ASCII and ANSI files properly. An example that illustrates the difference in appearance is part of this article. Alternatively, one could look at the file using the Type command in the command prompt.
In the art scene one popular ASCII style that used the 7-bit standard ASCII character set was the so called "Oldskool" Style. It is also called "Amiga style", due to its origin and widespread use on the Commodore Amiga
Computers. The style uses primarily the characters: _/\-+=.<>:. The "oldskool" art looks more like the outlined drawings of shapes than real pictures.
This is an example of "Amiga
style" (also referred to as "old school" or "oldskool" style) scene
ASCII art.
The Amiga ASCII Scene surfaced in 1992, 7 years after the introduction of the Commodore Amiga 1000
. The Commodore 64 PETSCII scene did not make the transition to the Commodore Amiga as the C64 demo and warez scenes did. Among the first Amiga ASCII art groups were ART, Epsilon Design, Upper Class, Unreal. This means that the text art scene on the Amiga was actually younger than the text art scene on the PC. The Amiga artists also did not call their ASCII art style "Oldskool". That term was introduced on the PC. When and by whom is unknown and lost in history.
The Amiga style ASCII artwork was most often released in the form of a single text file, which included all the artwork (usually requested), with some design parts in between, as opposed to the PC art scene where the art work was released as a ZIP archive with separate text files for each piece. Furthermore, the releases were usually called "ASCII collections" and not "art packs" like on the IBM PC.
This kind of ASCII art is hand made in a text editor. Popular editors used to make this kind of ASCII art include CygnusEd
itor aka CED (Amiga
) and EditPlus2
(PC
).
Oldskool font example from the PC, which was taken from the ASCII Editor FIGlet
.
"Newskool" is a popular form of ASCII art which capitalizes on character strings like "$#Xxo". In spite of its name, the style is not "new"; on the contrary, it was very old but fell out of favor and was replaced by "Oldskool" and "Block" style ASCII art. It was dubbed "Newskool" upon its comeback and renewed popularity at the end of the 1990s.
Newskool changed significantly as the result of the introduction of extended proprietary characters
. The classic 7-bit standard ASCII characters remain predominant, but the extended characters are often used for "fine tuning" and "tweaking". The style developed further after the introduction and adaptation of Unicode
.
to produce ASCII art, specialized programs have been developed that often simulate the features and tools in bitmap image editors. For Block ASCII art and ANSI art the artist almost always uses a special text editor, because the required characters are not available on a standard keyboard.
The special text editors have sets of special characters assigned to existing keys on the keyboard. Popular MS DOS based editors, such as TheDraw and ACiDDraw had multiple sets of different special characters mapped to the F-Keys to make the use of those characters easier for the artist who can switch between individual sets of characters via basic keyboard shortcuts. PabloDraw is one of the very few special ASCII/ANSI art editors that were developed for MS Windows XP.
. A method is to sample the image down to grayscale
with less than 8-bit
precision, and then assign a character for each value.
Examples of converted images are given below.
This is one of the earliest forms of ASCII art, dating back to the early days of the 1960s minicomputer
s and teletypes. During the 1970s it was popular in malls
to get a t-shirt
with a photograph printed in ASCII art on it from an automated kiosk manned by a computer. With the advent of the web and HTML
and CSS
, many ASCII conversion programs will now quantize to a full RGB colorspace, enabling colorized ASCII images.
Since the appearance of the first simple converter tools, individuals have converted images to ASCII art automatically and afterwards claimed that they generated the result themselves "by hand" via a text editor.
Images that were converted to text, where no touch up work was done after the conversion, can in almost every case be identified as such, at least by an experienced text artist. The detection of converted, software-generated text art becomes much more difficult if some time was spent by the editor to touch up the details that are typical indicators of auto-generation. The inconsistencies in "shading" in just one art piece are often what gives the software-created status away.
Still images or movies can also be converted to ASCII on various Linux and UNIX computers using the aalib (black and white) or libcaca (colour) graphics device driver, or the VLC media player
under Windows; all of which render the screen using ASCII symbols instead of pixels. See also O'Reilly article "Watch Videos in ASCII art".
, where all characters are identical in width (Courier
is a popular monospace font). Early computers in use when ASCII art came into vogue had monospace fonts for screen and printer displays. Today most of the more commonly used fonts in word processors, web browsers and other programs are proportional fonts, such as Helvetica
or Times Roman
, where different widths are used for different characters. ASCII art drawn for a fixed width font will usually appear distorted, or even unrecognizable when displayed in a proportional font.
Some ASCII artists have produced art for display in proportional fonts. These ASCIIs, rather than using a purely shade-based correspondence, use characters for slopes and borders and use block shading. These ASCIIs generally offer greater precision and attention to detail than fixed-width ASCIIs for a lower character count, although they are not as universally accessible since they are usually relatively font-specific.
terminals. These animations were simply text with cursor movement instructions, deleting and erasing the characters necessary to appear animated. Usually, they represented a long hand-crafted process undertaken by a single person to tell a story.
Contemporary web browser
revitalized animated ASCII art again. It became possible to display animated ASCII art via JavaScript
or Java applets
. Static ASCII art pictures are loaded and displayed one after another, creating the animation, very similar to how movie projectors unreel film reel and project the individual pictures on the big screen at movie theaters. A new term was born: ASCIImation - another name of Animated ASCII Art. A seminal work in this arena is the Star Wars ASCIImation. More complicated routines in JavaScript generate more elaborate ASCIImations showing effects like Morphing
effects, star field emulations, fading effects and calculated images, such as mandelbrot fractal
animations.
There are now many tools and programs that can transform raster images into text symbols; some of these tools can operate on streaming video. For example, the music video for pop singer Beck Hansen's song "Black Tambourine" is made up entirely of ASCII characters that approximate the original footage.
by default), 16 foreground colors, 8 background colors, and a flash option. Such art can be loaded into screen memory directly. ANSI.SYS, if loaded, also allows such art to be placed on screen by outputting escape sequences that indicate movements of the screen cursor and color/flash changes. If this method is used then the art becomes known as ANSI art
. The IBM PC code pages also include characters intended for simple drawing which often made this art appear much cleaner than that made with more traditional character sets. Plain text files are also seen with these characters, though they have become far less common since Windows GUI text editors (using the Windows ANSI code page) have largely replaced DOS based ones.
would seem to offer the ultimate flexibility in producing text based art with its huge variety of characters. However, finding a suitable fixed-width font is likely to be difficult if a significant subset of Unicode is desired. (Modern UNIX-style operating systems do provide complete fixed-width Unicode fonts, e.g. for xterm
. Windows has the Courier New font which includes characters like ┌╥─╨┐♥☺♫Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ) Also, the common practice of rendering Unicode with a mixture of variable width fonts is likely to make predictable display hard if more than a tiny subset of Unicode is used.
s could be used. The technique has fallen from popularity since all cheap printers can easily print photographs, and a normal text file (or an e-mail message or Usenet posting) cannot represent overprinted text. However, something similar has emerged to replace it: shaded or colored ASCII art, using ANSI video terminal markup or color codes (such as those found in HTML
, IRC
, and many internet message boards) to add a bit more tone variation. In this way, it is possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color.
Graphic design
Graphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...
technique that uses computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
s for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters
Character (computing)
In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....
defined by the ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor
Text editor
A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....
, and is often used with free-form language
Free-form language
In computer programming, a free-form language is a programming language in which the positioning of characters on the page in program text is not significant. Program text does not need to be placed in specific columns as on old punched card systems, and frequently ends of lines are not significant...
s. Most examples of ASCII art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
, as on a traditional typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
) such as Courier
Courier (typeface)
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter. The typeface was designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler in 1955...
for presentation.
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the
creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
The ASCII art phenomenon continues to exist in the social and mobile web, even when constrained to only 140 unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
characters, as exhibited by Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
channels such as @TW1TT3Rart and many others, tagged as #TwitterArt and #140art.
Typewriter art
Since 1867 typewriters have been used for creating visual art. The oldest known preserved example of typewriter art is a picture of a butterfly made in 1898 by Flora Stacey. Typewriter art was also called keyboard art.In the 1954 short film Stamp Day for Superman
Stamp Day for Superman
Stamp Day for Superman is a 1954 black-and-white short film starring George Reeves as Superman and Noel Neill as Lois Lane. It was produced by Superman Inc. for the United States Department of the Treasury to promote the purchase of U.S. Savings Bonds...
, typewriter art was a feature of the plot.
TTY and RTTY
TTY stands for "TeleTYpe" or "TeleTYpewriter" and is also known as TeleprinterTeleprinter
A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
or Teletype.
RTTY stands for Radioteletype
Radioteletype
Radioteletype is a telecommunications system consisting originally of two or more electromechanical teleprinters in different locations, later superseded by personal computers running software to emulate teleprinters, connected by radio rather than a wired link.The term radioteletype is used to...
; character sets such as Baudot code
Baudot code
The Baudot code, invented by Émile Baudot, is a character set predating EBCDIC and ASCII. It was the predecessor to the International Telegraph Alphabet No 2 , the teleprinter code in use until the advent of ASCII. Each character in the alphabet is represented by a series of bits, sent over a...
, which predated ASCII, were used. According to a chapter in the "RTTY Handbook", text images have been sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923. However, none of the "old" RTTY art has been discovered yet. What is known is that text images appeared frequently on radioteletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.
ASCII art
During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts
Computer font
A computer font is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term font first referred to a set of metal type sorts in one style and size, since the 1990s it is generally used to refer to a scalable set of digital shapes that may be...
became increasingly popular, leading to a decline in ASCII art. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUD
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
s, an acronym for "Multi-User Dungeon", (which are textual multiplayer
Multiplayer game
A multiplayer video game is one which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time. Unlike most other games, computer and video games are often single-player activities that put the player against preprogrammed challenges and/or AI-controlled opponents, which often...
role-playing video game
Role-playing video game
Role-playing video games are a video game genre with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. The player in RPGs controls one character, or several adventuring party members, fulfilling one or many quests...
s), Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, message boards and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.
Over the years, warez
Warez
Warez refers primarily to copyrighted works distributed without fees or royalties, and may be traded, in general violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to unauthorized releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar...
groups began to get into the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release .nfo
.nfo
.nfo is a commonly used three-letter filename extension of ASCII or extended ASCII text files that accompany other files and contain information about them. Such NFO files can be viewed with text editors or dedicated NFO viewers...
files with their software, cracks
Software cracking
Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...
or general illegal software reverse-engineering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the warez group's name and maybe some ASCII borders on the outsides of the release notes, etc.
Uses
Teleprinter
A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
s, non-graphic computer terminal
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
s, printer separators, in early computer network
Computer network
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
ing (e.g., BBSes
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, and Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
news messages. ASCII art is also used within the source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
of computer programs for representation of company or product logos, and flow control or other diagrams. In some cases, the entire source code of a program is a piece of ASCII art — for instance, an entry to one of the earlier International Obfuscated C Code Contest
International Obfuscated C Code Contest
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code. It was held annually between 1984 and 1996, and thereafter in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005 and 2006....
is a program that adds numbers, but visually looks like a binary adder drawn in logic ports.
Examples of ASCII-style art predating the modern computer era can be found in the June 1939, July 1948 and October 1948 editions of Popular Mechanics.
"0verkill" is a 2D platform multiplayer shooter game designed entirely in colour ASCII art. MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...
and VLC media player
VLC media player
VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
can display videos as ASCII art. ASCII art is used in the making of DOS-based ZZT
ZZT
ZZT is an ANSI character-based computer game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games , who later designed Unreal. It remains a popular DOS game creation system. ZZT itself is not an acronym for anything; its title was simply chosen so it would always appear at the very bottom of newsgroup...
games.
Many game walkthrough guides come as part of a basic .txt file; this file often contains the name of the game in ASCII art. Such as below, word art is created using backslashes and other ASCII values in order to create the illusion of 3D.
Types and styles
Different techniques could be used in ASCII art to obtain different artistic effects:.--. /\
'--' /__\ (^._.^)~
- Line art, for creating shapes
.g@8g. db
'Y8@P' d88b
- Solid art, for creating filled shapes
:$#$: "4b. ':.
:$#$: "4b. ':.
- Shading, using different symbol density and shading for creating gradients or contrasts
|\_/| ****************************
/ @ @ \ * "Purrrfectly pleasant" *
( > º < ) * Poppy Prinz *
`»»x««´ * (pprinz@...) *
/ O \ ****************************
- combinations used as SIG (signature) at the end of an email
Emoticons and verticons
The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. They are commonly referred to as 'emoticonEmoticon
An emoticon is a facial expression pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood. Emoticons are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau word...
', 'smilie', or 'smiley
Smiley
A smiley, smiley face, or happy face, is a stylized representation of a smiling human face, commonly occurring in popular culture. It is commonly represented as a yellow circle with two black dots representing eyes and a black arc representing the mouth...
There is another type of one-line ASCII art that does not require the mental rotation of pictures, which is widely known in Japan as kaomoji (literally "face characters".) Traditionally, they are referred to as "ASCII face ".
More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures.
Popular smileys
The list only shows some popular examples for demonstration purposes. Hundreds of different text smileys were developed over time, but only a few were generally accepted, used and understood.| Icon | Meaning | Icon | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
|
classic smile | winking | |
|
classic sad | |
yawn or surprised |
|
smile | |
Laughter |
|
evil laugh | ||
|
evil grin | |
surprised |
|
buck-tooth | |
crying smiley |
|
with braces or sick smiley | |
crying |
|
tongue sticking out (silly) | |
angry |
| indifferent; worried, amazed | |
gasp, surprised, astonished | |
|
smiley with glasses | |
annoyed, really? not surprised, serious. |
|
ಠ_ಠ | A look of disapproval or disbelief | |
|
Crazy | ||
|
Angel | ||
|
Confused |
ASCII Art Farts
ASCII Art Farts is a web comic consisting of selected or original ASCII art with an added caption, often offensive. The first "fart", as individual comics are called, is dated June 25, 1999 and new comics have been published daily since. The comics are credited to "tQn" (TRAN Q. NGUYEN).The Adventures of Nerd Boy
The Adventures of Nerd Boy, or just Nerd Boy is an ASCII comic by Joaquim Gândara between August 6, 2001 and July 17, 2007, consisting of 600 strips. They were posted to ASCII art newsgroupNewsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
alt.ascii-art and on the website. Some strips have been translated to Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
.
Atari 400/800 ATASCII
The Atari 400/800Atari 8-bit family
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...
did not follow the ASCII standard and had its own character set, called ATASCII
ATASCII
The ATASCII character set, from ATARI Standard Code for Information Interchange, alternatively ATARI ASCII, is the variation on ASCII used in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. The first of this family were the Atari 400 and 800, released in 1979, and later models were released throughout...
. The emergence of ATASCII art coincided with the growing popularity of BBS Systems
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
caused by availability of the acoustic coupler
Acoustic coupler
In telecommunications, the term acoustic coupler has the following meanings:# An interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means—usually into and out of a telephone instrument....
s that were compatible with the 8-bit home computers. ATASCII text animations are also referred to as "break animations" by the Atari sceners.
C-64 PETSCII
The Commodore 64Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
, which was released in 1982, also did not follow the ASCII standard. The C-64 character set is called PETSCII
PETSCII
PETSCII , also known as CBM ASCII, is the variation of the ASCII character set used in Commodore Business Machines 's 8-bit home computers, starting with the PET from 1977 and including the VIC-20, C64, CBM-II, Plus/4, C16, C116 and C128...
, an extended form of ASCII-1963
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
. As with the Atari's ATASCII art, C-64 fans developed a similar scene that used PETSCII for their creations.
"Block ASCII" / "High ASCII" style ASCII art on the IBM PC
Code page 437
IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437 is the character set of the original IBM PC. It is also known as CP 437, OEM 437, PC-8, MS-DOS Latin US or sometimes misleadingly referred to as the OEM font, High ASCII or Extended ASCII....
, which is a proprietary standard introduced by IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC and MS DOS operating system. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform. Until then, "block ASCIIs" dominated the PC Text Art Scene
Computer art scene
The phrase computer art scene, or artscene for short, refers to a community of individuals and groups that are both interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.-Early computer art:...
.
The first art scene group that focused on the extended character set of the PC in their art work was called "Aces of ANSI Art," or "AAA." Some members of left in 1990, and formed a group called ACiD
ACiD Productions
ACiD Productions is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for BBSes. More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development...
, "ANSI Creators in Demand." In that same year the second major underground art scene group was founded, ICE
ICE Advertisements
iCE Advertisements is a digital art group formed in 1991. Although the expanded title is rarely ever used, iCE is an acronym for Insane Creators Enterprise...
, "Insane Creators Enterprise".
There is some debate between ASCII and block ASCII artist, with "Hardcore" ASCII artists maintaining that block ASCII art is in fact not ANSI art
ANSI art
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...
, because it does not use the 128 characters of the original ASCII standard. On the other hand, block ASCII artists argue that if their art uses only characters of the computers character set, then it is to be called ASCII, regardless if the character set is proprietary or not.
Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard
American National Standards Institute
The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...
x3.16. One can view block ASCIIs with a text editor using the font "Terminal
Terminal (font)
Terminal is a family of monospaced raster typefaces. It is relatively small compared to Courier. It uses crossed zeros, and is designed to approximate the font normally used in MS-DOS or other text-based consoles such as on Linux...
", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI viewer, such as ACiDView for Windows (see ASCII and ANSI art viewers), one can see block ASCII and ANSI files properly. An example that illustrates the difference in appearance is part of this article. Alternatively, one could look at the file using the Type command in the command prompt.
"Amiga"/"Oldskool" style ASCII art
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
Computers. The style uses primarily the characters: _/\-+=.<>:. The "oldskool" art looks more like the outlined drawings of shapes than real pictures.
This is an example of "Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
style" (also referred to as "old school" or "oldskool" style) scene
Computer art scene
The phrase computer art scene, or artscene for short, refers to a community of individuals and groups that are both interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.-Early computer art:...
ASCII art.
The Amiga ASCII Scene surfaced in 1992, 7 years after the introduction of the Commodore Amiga 1000
Amiga 1000
The A1000, or Commodore Amiga 1000, was Commodore's initial Amiga personal computer, introduced on July 23, 1985 at the Lincoln Center in New York City....
. The Commodore 64 PETSCII scene did not make the transition to the Commodore Amiga as the C64 demo and warez scenes did. Among the first Amiga ASCII art groups were ART, Epsilon Design, Upper Class, Unreal. This means that the text art scene on the Amiga was actually younger than the text art scene on the PC. The Amiga artists also did not call their ASCII art style "Oldskool". That term was introduced on the PC. When and by whom is unknown and lost in history.
The Amiga style ASCII artwork was most often released in the form of a single text file, which included all the artwork (usually requested), with some design parts in between, as opposed to the PC art scene where the art work was released as a ZIP archive with separate text files for each piece. Furthermore, the releases were usually called "ASCII collections" and not "art packs" like on the IBM PC.
In text editors
_____ ___ ____ _ _
| ___|_ _/ ___| | ___| |_
| |_ | | | _| |/ _ \ __|
| _| | | |_| | | __/ |_
|_| |___\____|_|\___|\__|
This kind of ASCII art is hand made in a text editor. Popular editors used to make this kind of ASCII art include CygnusEd
CygnusEd
CygnusEd is a text editor for the Amiga OS and MorphOS. It was developed in 1986-1987 by Bruce Dawson, Colin Fox and Steve LaRocque who were working for CygnusSoft Software...
itor aka CED (Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
) and EditPlus2
EditPlus
EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor for the Microsoft Windows operating system, developed by Sangil Kim of ES-Computing. The editor contains tools for programmers, including syntax highlighting , file type conversions, line ending conversion , regular expressions for search-and-replace, keystroke...
(PC
Wintel
Wintel is a portmanteau of Windows and Intel, referring to personal computers using Intel x86 compatible processors running Microsoft Windows...
).
Oldskool font example from the PC, which was taken from the ASCII Editor FIGlet
FIGlet
FIGlet is a computer program that generates text banners, in a variety of typefaces, composed of letters made up of conglomerations of smaller ASCII characters ....
.
Newskool style ASCII art
Newskool changed significantly as the result of the introduction of extended proprietary characters
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
. The classic 7-bit standard ASCII characters remain predominant, but the extended characters are often used for "fine tuning" and "tweaking". The style developed further after the introduction and adaptation of Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
.
Methods for generating ASCII art
While some prefer to use a simple text editorText editor
A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....
to produce ASCII art, specialized programs have been developed that often simulate the features and tools in bitmap image editors. For Block ASCII art and ANSI art the artist almost always uses a special text editor, because the required characters are not available on a standard keyboard.
The special text editors have sets of special characters assigned to existing keys on the keyboard. Popular MS DOS based editors, such as TheDraw and ACiDDraw had multiple sets of different special characters mapped to the F-Keys to make the use of those characters easier for the artist who can switch between individual sets of characters via basic keyboard shortcuts. PabloDraw is one of the very few special ASCII/ANSI art editors that were developed for MS Windows XP.
Image to text conversion
Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to text characters, which is a special case of vector quantizationVector quantization
Vector quantization is a classical quantization technique from signal processing which allows the modeling of probability density functions by the distribution of prototype vectors. It was originally used for data compression. It works by dividing a large set of points into groups having...
. A method is to sample the image down to grayscale
Grayscale
In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information...
with less than 8-bit
Integer (computer science)
In computer science, an integer is a datum of integral data type, a data type which represents some finite subset of the mathematical integers. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values....
precision, and then assign a character for each value.
Examples of converted images are given below.
This is one of the earliest forms of ASCII art, dating back to the early days of the 1960s minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s and teletypes. During the 1970s it was popular in malls
Shopping mall
A shopping mall, shopping centre, shopping arcade, shopping precinct or simply mall is one or more buildings forming a complex of shops representing merchandisers, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit, along with a parking area — a modern, indoor version...
to get a t-shirt
T-shirt
A T-shirt is a style of shirt. A T-shirt is buttonless and collarless, with short sleeves and frequently a round neck line....
with a photograph printed in ASCII art on it from an automated kiosk manned by a computer. With the advent of the web and HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
and CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
, many ASCII conversion programs will now quantize to a full RGB colorspace, enabling colorized ASCII images.
Since the appearance of the first simple converter tools, individuals have converted images to ASCII art automatically and afterwards claimed that they generated the result themselves "by hand" via a text editor.
Images that were converted to text, where no touch up work was done after the conversion, can in almost every case be identified as such, at least by an experienced text artist. The detection of converted, software-generated text art becomes much more difficult if some time was spent by the editor to touch up the details that are typical indicators of auto-generation. The inconsistencies in "shading" in just one art piece are often what gives the software-created status away.
 |
 |
Still images or movies can also be converted to ASCII on various Linux and UNIX computers using the aalib (black and white) or libcaca (colour) graphics device driver, or the VLC media player
VLC media player
VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
under Windows; all of which render the screen using ASCII symbols instead of pixels. See also O'Reilly article "Watch Videos in ASCII art".
Non fixed-width ASCII
Most ASCII art is created using a monospace fontMonospace font
A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space...
, where all characters are identical in width (Courier
Courier (typeface)
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter. The typeface was designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler in 1955...
is a popular monospace font). Early computers in use when ASCII art came into vogue had monospace fonts for screen and printer displays. Today most of the more commonly used fonts in word processors, web browsers and other programs are proportional fonts, such as Helvetica
Helvetica
Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i....
or Times Roman
Times Roman
Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931, created by Victor Lardent at the English branch of Monotype. It was commissioned after Stanley Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically antiquated...
, where different widths are used for different characters. ASCII art drawn for a fixed width font will usually appear distorted, or even unrecognizable when displayed in a proportional font.
Some ASCII artists have produced art for display in proportional fonts. These ASCIIs, rather than using a purely shade-based correspondence, use characters for slopes and borders and use block shading. These ASCIIs generally offer greater precision and attention to detail than fixed-width ASCIIs for a lower character count, although they are not as universally accessible since they are usually relatively font-specific.
Animated ASCII art
Animated ASCII art started in 1970 from so-called VT100 animations produced on vt100VT100
The VT100 is a video terminal that was made by Digital Equipment Corporation . Its detailed attributes became the de facto standard for terminal emulators.-History:...
terminals. These animations were simply text with cursor movement instructions, deleting and erasing the characters necessary to appear animated. Usually, they represented a long hand-crafted process undertaken by a single person to tell a story.
Contemporary web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
revitalized animated ASCII art again. It became possible to display animated ASCII art via JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
or Java applets
Java (Sun)
Java refers to several computer software products and specifications from Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, that together provide a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform environment...
. Static ASCII art pictures are loaded and displayed one after another, creating the animation, very similar to how movie projectors unreel film reel and project the individual pictures on the big screen at movie theaters. A new term was born: ASCIImation - another name of Animated ASCII Art. A seminal work in this arena is the Star Wars ASCIImation. More complicated routines in JavaScript generate more elaborate ASCIImations showing effects like Morphing
Morphing
Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes one image into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence. Traditionally such a depiction...
effects, star field emulations, fading effects and calculated images, such as mandelbrot fractal
Mandelbrot set
The Mandelbrot set is a particular mathematical set of points, whose boundary generates a distinctive and easily recognisable two-dimensional fractal shape...
animations.
There are now many tools and programs that can transform raster images into text symbols; some of these tools can operate on streaming video. For example, the music video for pop singer Beck Hansen's song "Black Tambourine" is made up entirely of ASCII characters that approximate the original footage.
Other text-based art
There are a variety of other types of art using text symbols from character sets other than ASCII and/or some form of color coding. Despite not being pure ASCII, these are still often referred to as "ASCII art". The character set portion designed specifically for drawing is known as the line drawing characters or pseudo-graphics.ANSI art
The IBM PC graphics hardware in text mode uses 16 bits per character. It supports a variety of configurations, but in its default mode under DOS they are used to give 256 glyphs from one of the IBM PC code pages (Code page 437Code page 437
IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437 is the character set of the original IBM PC. It is also known as CP 437, OEM 437, PC-8, MS-DOS Latin US or sometimes misleadingly referred to as the OEM font, High ASCII or Extended ASCII....
by default), 16 foreground colors, 8 background colors, and a flash option. Such art can be loaded into screen memory directly. ANSI.SYS, if loaded, also allows such art to be placed on screen by outputting escape sequences that indicate movements of the screen cursor and color/flash changes. If this method is used then the art becomes known as ANSI art
ANSI art
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...
. The IBM PC code pages also include characters intended for simple drawing which often made this art appear much cleaner than that made with more traditional character sets. Plain text files are also seen with these characters, though they have become far less common since Windows GUI text editors (using the Windows ANSI code page) have largely replaced DOS based ones.
Shift_JIS
A large character selection and the availability of fixed-width characters allow Japanese users to use Shift JIS as a text-based art on Japanese websites.Unicode
UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
would seem to offer the ultimate flexibility in producing text based art with its huge variety of characters. However, finding a suitable fixed-width font is likely to be difficult if a significant subset of Unicode is desired. (Modern UNIX-style operating systems do provide complete fixed-width Unicode fonts, e.g. for xterm
Xterm
In computing, xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. A user can have many different invocations of xterm running at once on the same display, each of which provides independent input/output for the process running in it .xterm originated prior to the X Window System...
. Windows has the Courier New font which includes characters like ┌╥─╨┐♥☺♫Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ) Also, the common practice of rendering Unicode with a mixture of variable width fonts is likely to make predictable display hard if more than a tiny subset of Unicode is used.
Overprinting (surprint)
In the 1970s and early 1980s it was popular to produce a kind of text art that relied on overprinting — the overall darkness of a particular character space dependent on how many characters, as well as the choice of character, printed in a particular place. Thanks to the increased granularity of tone, photographs were often converted to this type of printout. Even manual typewriters or daisy wheel printerDaisy wheel printer
Daisy wheel printers use an impact printing technology invented in 1969 by David S. Lee at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to premium typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, but two to...
s could be used. The technique has fallen from popularity since all cheap printers can easily print photographs, and a normal text file (or an e-mail message or Usenet posting) cannot represent overprinted text. However, something similar has emerged to replace it: shaded or colored ASCII art, using ANSI video terminal markup or color codes (such as those found in HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, IRC
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
, and many internet message boards) to add a bit more tone variation. In this way, it is possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color.
See also
- Fax artFax artFax art is art specifically designed to be sent or transmitted by a facsimile machine, where the "fax art" is the received "fax". It is also called telecommunications art or telematic art. "Fax art was another means of mediating distances," according to art historians Annmarie Chandler and Norie...
- Types and Styles: ASCII stereogramASCII stereogramASCII stereograms are a form of ASCII art based on stereograms to produce the optical illusion of a three-dimensional image by crossing the eyes appropriately using a single image or a pair of images next to each other....
, EmoticonEmoticonAn emoticon is a facial expression pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood. Emoticons are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau word...
, FILE ID.DIZFILE ID.DIZFILE_ID.DIZ is a plain text file containing a brief contentdescription of the archive in which it is included.It was originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems ....
, .nfo.nfo.nfo is a commonly used three-letter filename extension of ASCII or extended ASCII text files that accompany other files and contain information about them. Such NFO files can be viewed with text editors or dedicated NFO viewers...
(release info file) - Box-drawing characters
- Related art: ANSI artANSI artANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...
, ASCII pornASCII pornThe term ASCII porn, or "ASCII pr0n", describes pornographic images consisting of ASCII art. It was the world's first internet pornography, and was popular before the invention of the World-Wide Web, and often found on BBSes and other text mode terminal-based systems that could be reached via...
, Shift JIS artShift JIS artShift_JIS art is artwork created from characters within the Shift JIS character set, a superset of ASCII intended for Japanese usage. Naturally there are many similarities between Shift_JIS artwork and ASCII art.... - Related (context): TMDC, Bulletin board systemBulletin board systemA Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
(BBS), Computer art sceneComputer art sceneThe phrase computer art scene, or artscene for short, refers to a community of individuals and groups that are both interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.-Early computer art:...
, :Category:Artscene groups - Pre-ASCII history: TypewriterTypewriterA typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
, TeleprinterTeleprinterA teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
, RadioteletypeRadioteletypeRadioteletype is a telecommunications system consisting originally of two or more electromechanical teleprinters in different locations, later superseded by personal computers running software to emulate teleprinters, connected by radio rather than a wired link.The term radioteletype is used to...
, ATASCIIATASCIIThe ATASCII character set, from ATARI Standard Code for Information Interchange, alternatively ATARI ASCII, is the variation on ASCII used in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. The first of this family were the Atari 400 and 800, released in 1979, and later models were released throughout...
, PETSCIIPETSCIIPETSCII , also known as CBM ASCII, is the variation of the ASCII character set used in Commodore Business Machines 's 8-bit home computers, starting with the PET from 1977 and including the VIC-20, C64, CBM-II, Plus/4, C16, C116 and C128... - Way to input special symbols: Alt codesAlt codesOn personal computers running the Microsoft Windows or DOS operating systems, additional characters to those available in the current keyboard layout can be typed using an Alt code: pressing and holding the Alt key while entering a character code with the keyboard's numeric keypad...
- Software: AAlibAAlibAAlib is a software library which allows applications to automatically convert still and moving images into ASCII art.It has been used in a wide variety of programs, including a conversion of Quake II which allows the 3D game to be played on dumb terminals, and to let media players output in text...
, cowsayCowsaycowsay is a program which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message. It can also generate pictures using pre-made images of other animals...