Re: About rendering ascii code in a .txt medium

Pete Casso (pet...@sympatico.ca) wrote:
: course, one does not have to be that stupid! Use a font that is available
: on all platforms, that's a little bit smarter!

I just had to catch this one. I would really, really, like to see a font
that comes with both Windows'95 and Amiga Workbench 1.3, not to mention the
countless other platforms out there. (My newer Amiga, which has WB 3.0,
does have a font called Courier, though its resemblance with the Windows
font of the same name is another matter entirely..)

The bottom line is, you can't. That's exactly the point in designing ascii
art to be viewable in any fixed-width font. It's called portability. Sure,
you can make ascii art that works only on some special font. The few people
using the exact same font might even consider it good ascii art, at least
until they try to share it with a friend.

I'm not sure if we are using the same terms here. What you seem to call
ascii art, I call text art, of which ascii art is a subclass. Either way,
it seems to me that, using your terms, one cannot completely separate the
artform from the medium, since the medium partially defines the artform.

A virtual model of a sculpture is not a sculpture, since it lacks the
limits imposed by real material. Similarly, a recording of a piece of
music is not the same as a live performance. I do not say that either
would be inferior to the original, but they are not the same. Ascii art
is perhaps most closely related to mosaic works, and a similar
distincition appears there; an oil painting of a mosaic is not a mosaic,
though it may look like one. 

The reason some people go watch a play instead of seeing a movie - even
though the latter can present the story identically, if desired, or
possibly better that the former - is the limits (the stage) and the
variability (live actors) imposed by the medium. These are not
necessarily imperfections to overcome, but rather the very intrinsic
characteristics of the medium that make the artform what it is.

I could most likely present every ascii picture I make better by drawing
it on paper. Even if the ascii version were "perfect", I could always
reproduce it exactly. The reason for making any ascii art at all is the
medium - the fact that ascii art can be represented as text and displayed
in various fonts. The analogy is quite perfect in that the representation
of an ascii artwork on the screen or on paper is related to the artwork
itself just like a particular performance is related to the play itself.
By transforming an ascii picture into a bitmap, or a play into a video
recording, means removing some limitations and adding others - even
exactness can be a limitation.

And yes, I do see that with the right interpretation one could say that
we both are right and saying the same things. Whether such an
interpretation would be sensible is a different matter, as is whether we
might also mean the same thing. I doubt it.

--  __,,,------._
 ,-/|            `-.  Ilmari Karonen (ilt...@sci.fi) ^ All opinions expressed
/,  '\,     `.  ,|"-;;.__ http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/ | in this message are my
/ ' 4(_,-_,-"_,/.'   `'--' ,------------------------' own. If you want me to
"`-(_,-"" `-' (,' itz      | make some for you too, you should pay for them!

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