HN Explorer

11 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread
muck
I fail to see how this is ASCII art. ASCII didn't even exist before 1934. A more appropriate title might be Typewriter Art.
mindstab
Lots of forms of art don't get a genera name until after they've started ;). Just because the first "cubist" painting came before the term got coined doesn't mean it isn't a cubist painting. And just because this showed up a few decades before ASCII itself was hammered out doesn't mean we all don't know exactly what it is when it's described as ASCII art.
Luyt
It is also reminiscent of an embroidering pattern.
allenp
I agree - I think this is more a cross-stitch pattern than ascii art - especially since it only uses one character (X). It is however quite fancy, and I do appreciate the time it would have taken to produce it.
zandorg
I imagine you could just trace over an existing picture then type X's over the tracing paper, with a typewriter.
eru
You still need a monochrome [0] picture that looks good at low resolution.

[0] Or rather bichrome.

Semiapies
For that matter, it's not "ASCII art" because it's encoded that way (as opposed to "UTF-16 art"), it's because it's made up of text characters in a grid.

This certainly counts.

malkia
Was Jesus Christian, and were Neandertahls from Neandertahl, and so and so...
eru
(The h in `Neandertahl' isn't quite right.)
[dead] muck
I failed to mention this in my original comment, but it's also not ASCII art as it only uses one character. My understanding of ASCII art is that it using different characters to form an image. Just look at every ASCII art from Wikipedia's page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art). Different characters contribute different visual aspects (like the edges). By just using one character it's essentially a dot matrix image. I don't consider a dot matrix image ASCII art (even though it uses the ASCII character ".").