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.
History
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 a woman named Flora Stacey.
In the 1954 short film Stamp Day for Superman, typewriter art was a feature of the plot.
TTY and RTTY
TTY stands for "TeleTYpe" or "TeleTYpewriter" and is also known as Teleprinter or Teletype. RTTY stands for Radioteletype. 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 the fact that text images appeared frequently on radio teletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.
ASCII art
There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126.
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 MUDs (textual multiplayer roleplaying games), 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.
Uses
A tank and a truck both made using ASCII art.
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, teletypes, non-graphic computer terminals, printer separators, in early computer networking (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. There is also a video driver for the popular video game Quake that displays the game in 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. Another example of ASCII art in games is "Original War", a little-known game for Windows, in which the cutscenes for the Russians are made up totally of ASCII art.
Emoticons and verticons
Main article: Emoticon
The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. They are commonly referred to as 'emoticon', '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 ". Today, some call them "verticons".
More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures.
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 newsgroup alt.ascii-art and on the website.[16] Some strips have been translated to Polish[17][18] and French
[edit] Styles of the computer underground text art scene
[edit] Atari 400/800 ATASCII
The Atari 400/800 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 couplers that were compatible with the 8-bit home computers. ATASCII text animations are also referred to as "break animations" by the Atari sceners.[citation needed]
C-64 PETSCII
The Commodore 64, 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.
[edit] "Block ASCII"/"High ASCII" style ASCII art on the IBM PC
Block ASCII display via Notepad versus ACiDView for Windows
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 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.
"Amiga"/"Oldskool" style ASCII art
Oldschool/Amiga ASCII look on Commodore Amiga Computer versus look on the IBM PC (notice the tight spacing)
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.[21]
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
CygnusEditor aka CED (Amiga) and EditPlus2 (PC).
"Newskool" style ASCII art
Newskool ASCII Screenshot
Another popular style of the PC underground art scene, which is using primarily the characters like "$#Xxo." was called "Newskool". This label is actually inaccurate because the style was not "new"; on the contrary it was very old but fell out of favor and was replaced by "Oldskool" and "Block" style ASCII art. Most sceners deemed it a new style, nonetheless, and dubbed it "Newskool" upon its comeback and renewed popularity at the end of the nineties.[21]
"Newskool" continued to evolve and the use of extended proprietary characters was introduced. The classic 7-bit standard ASCII characters remain predominant. The extended characters are primarily used for "fine tuning" and "tweaking" of the ASCII image. With the introduction and wide spread adaptation of Unicode the style developed further and new forms of text art evolved from that as well.
Oldskool font example from the PC, which was taken from the ASCII Editor FIGlet.
Methods for generating ASCII art
Main article: List of text editors#ASCII_and_ANSI_art
While some prefer to use a simple text editor 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.
[edit] Image to text conversion
Main article: ASCII art converters
Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to text characters, which is a special case of vector quantization. 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.
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 fraudster 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 fraudster away.
Non fixed-width ASCII
Most ASCII art is created using a monospace font, where all characters are identical in width (Courier New is a popular font). However, most of the more commonly used fonts in word processors, web browsers and other programs are proportional fonts, such as Arial or Times New 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 such 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 vt100 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 theatres. 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.
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 437 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.
Shift_JIS
A large character selection, the widespread use of Japanese on the internet, and the availability of standard fonts with predictable spacing make Shift JIS a common format for text based art on the internet.
[edit] Unicode
Main article: Unicode
Unicode 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.) 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, making a complicated picture.
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 printers 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
