Well the point of this, is to ensure that stuff like dashed lines, appears as a solid line. So in the context of ascii-art, this reduces the screen door effect (At the cost of visibility of alphanumeric texts).
If you look at the style, it's essentially just moving text characters closer to each other.
I don't have perfect vision, so these sort of glows kick in automatically, especially when I'm tired. I't problematic enough to make me switch to a lower contrast theme when I work at night. It would make sense to apply an effect like that only if it were _increasing_ legibility.
Notice the rare case where the drop-shadow helps increase the contrast between foreground and background. You'll get props for doing that any time you pull it off.
Good point. But I may make the case, that ascii art is more about pictures, and less about text. So the reduced readability of text might not matter as much. I tried shadowless, and its less visually appealing.
/\_/\
____/ o o \
/~____ =-= /
(______)__m_m)
But in the context of ascii-diagrams, then I can see you point of not including stylised drop shadows.
I suppose what you like about the effect most, is that it fills the gaps that are intrinsic to ASCII art. But our brains are already wired to do that: http://bit.ly/1xeEci5. The shadow blur eats away at the details that are in fact a quality of ASCII art (like which characters were chosen to emulate a shape). The demonstrated CSS drop-shadow effect is really easily toggled by squinting your eyes instead: http://bit.ly/1DNrkXK.
Guess you're right in stating that it looks "cooler" though. Try making the shadows dark grey instead of black: http://cl.ly/image/073a412z0f34.
Although, I like the Mona Lisa example, I have to think that the point of ASCII art is to look like ASCII art because if it doesn't, then it's just a shitty picture. Cool POC tho.
It would be relatively simple to do, I'm surprised that http://asciiflow.com/ doesn't have an option for it, but now that I think about it a little more I think most people create these ascii diagrams because they just want ascii for embedding in a text doc and probably? don't need to convert them.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] threadIf you look at the style, it's essentially just moving text characters closer to each other.
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Btw, no shadow example is added now.
Take a look at this a demo pic: http://cl.ly/image/1i0x2X3W3G0x
Notice the rare case where the drop-shadow helps increase the contrast between foreground and background. You'll get props for doing that any time you pull it off.
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Btw, no shadow example is added now.
Guess you're right in stating that it looks "cooler" though. Try making the shadows dark grey instead of black: http://cl.ly/image/073a412z0f34.
text-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(100,100,100,0.5);
Also speaking of which I created a canvas breakout game that uses a modified version of that lib a month ago - https://github.com/jarv/ascii-breakout (http://ascii-breakout.com if you want to see it in action)
On a side note. I wonder if you would like to somehow port http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/ to javascript.
Since many technical diagrams are done in ascii. It might actually be handy to auto convert to a Canvas image.
Not sure how one would deal with ascii-art to canvas however. But technical drawings is important.