Ascii art – dead or alive? (blog.sourcerer.io)

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

There is a cool gallery of ascii art [here](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/) Reddit for example.

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

nice one

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

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 which has some of the prettiest ASCII art I have ever seen.

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/

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

- Finally, there is the BB demo: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/

- BB on YouTube: 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/

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

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

Fellow ascii artist reporting in. Check out http://pc.textmod.es/ 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/...

>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.

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...

I use Monodraw (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/) is a simpler alternative.

brew install cowsay

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

That's interesting. I just experimented with a sort of ascii scroll dither effect on my personal site: https://www.monokai.nl

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.