What is ASCII art

ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1967 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of the 7-bit standard 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 languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

ASCII art had been originally developed around 1966, by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton, 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 of ASCII art

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.

Today, ASCII art is still widely used in websites such as GameFAQs and LUElinks. A popular ASCII art is LUEshi, which shows Mario riding a Yoshi.

Over the Years, Warez Groups have began to get into the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release .nfo files with their software, cracks or general illegal software reverse-enginering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the Warez groups name and maybe some ASCII boarders on the outsides of the release notes etc. One example of a Warez group is Echelon.

Image to text conversion

Various program languages make provisions 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.

As an example, click on the image to the right which will launch to a page that will render the image with the text character "#".

Links

Nerd boy
AsciiArtFarts.com
ASCII aircraft art