ASCII Art – The Concept
Created by the American National Standards Institute, this art form refers to the use of character codes to create art forms. ASCII is an acronym for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” This universally acceptable character coding that is alphabet based. It is used to enable information exchange between computers. In general, the art term is used to talk about text-based art. This style of art was created basically, because printers in early days did not have the ability to print graphics.
The Details
Every character has its own individual hexadecimal and binary number under ASCII. The coding scheme is such that it allots a numeric value to numbers, alphabets, punctuation marks, and other characters. The values of these characters are standardized. This in turn allows computers as well as computer programs to share information. The character set comprises 128 characters that are standardized on almost all types of computers. However, the characters used in ASCII Art are the 95 characters from #32 to #126. These 95 characters used are the ones present in any keyboard. Other symbols and characters are not standardized and are therefore, not recommended for use in creating ASCII Art. Many people may not be able to view the creation properly, if the characters other than the 95 standard keyboard characters are used.
This art form refers to the creation of pictures without any graphics. The artwork is also referred to as “non-graphical graphics.” To view ASCII art properly and accurately, it must be displayed in a font that uses uniform character width, also called ‘fixed-pitch font.’ Some of the fixed-pitch fonts include “FixedSys,” “Courier,” and “Monaco.” Proportional fonts are not used to create ASCII Art, as the widths of the letters vary across fonts. This results in an artwork that appears skewed.
The Artworks
ASCII art is more in use where text can be transmitted or printed easily in comparison to graphics and in places where graphics cannot be transmitted. It is also used to represent logos of companies or products, for representing flow charts. “0verkill” is an example of a 2D platform shooter game that has been completely designed in color ASCII art. Moreover, VLC media player and MPlayer have the ability to display videos in the form of ASCII Art. One of the simplest types is the combination of two or more characters to express emotions in text format. These are called ‘smiley’ or ’emoticons’ in common parlance. It is also possible to create ASCII Art, with characters in different colors.
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