Re: About rendering ascii code in a .txt medium

Benjamin Goldberg wrote:
> And you are overlooking that, while other things than the ascii file itself are
> required to view the ascii art, there are limitations on the storage format of
> that ascii file;  No matter what kind of viewer you use, the underlying libraries
> generally expect that one character is stored in one byte.
> 
> Furthermore, while ascii might be more than just the code set, the code set is
> an intrinsic part of ascii.  If you store characters in any way other than
> that specified by the ascii standard [which is, as we all know, is simply a
> mapping between byte-values, numbers in the range 0x00..0x7f, and visual-glyphs,
> letters which may be displayed in any font or style the viewer chooses], then it
> is not ascii.

I have not overlooked anything, I think I see more than you do :-)

Contrary to what you said, the ascii standard contains no limitations or
requirements on storage. As far as going forward with asii art is concerned,
that's decisive.

> We all agree that the ascii standard says nothing about typographical codes -
> it only speaks of [if a written document can be said to "speak"] what letter of
> the english alphabet, or what placement character [I speak of newlines and
> carriage returns here] specific bytes should be displayed as.
> This means that [as an example] text being displayed in Courier font and
> text being displayed in Ariel are both ascii, because the data regarding the
> font is not part of the file; it is stored in the editor.  What you seem to
> be missing is that if you insert special characters into the file to change
> the font/style/whatever, the ascii standard will require that those octets
> be interpreted as letters or placement characters.

What you need to add are not special characters, but display instructions on
the font/style/whatever, or else the artwork won't appear at all. 

Simple text editors make simple assumptions about the display instructions,
and these days, the assumptions are wrong 20% of the time, damaging ascii art.

Contrary to what you said, the ascii standard does not contain any
requirements on any interpretations of those display instructions.

=========================================================
[]   .oo     Visit the Gallery of the 'steins!         []
[]  (  -)   http://www3.sympatico.ca/petecasso/        []
[]   " "   Frogstein, who has a point behind his eyes  []
=========================================================

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