Answers to some questions

Judy (vjo...@community.net) asked --

> I like ascii art but what do you do with it??? What can you use it on???

If you like looking at it, you should enjoy doing it even more. It is
huge fun, and provides a great sense of accomplishment.

As for practical uses, there are many. Diagrams and other artwork done in
ASCII can be transmitted in a flash and displayed instantly on almost any
computer connected to the Internet, indeed almost any computer in the
world. Lots of documents on the Web use ASCII art instead of bitmaps, and
as a result they have a much wider potential audience. Millions of people
use text-only terminals on freenets and university and library systems,
and ASCII is the only way to bring graphical information to them.

There are specialized applications that require bitmap rendering of
graphical information, but for general information transfer, there is
very little that you *can't* do with ASCII.
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Alisha (sop...@g-dav.demon.co.uk) wrote --

> >hey.. there are a couple non-ascii characters in the list that ought not
> >to be used...  � and � and �
> Why not use them? They _are_ keys on the keyboard after all.

This is an unfortunate situation. Many computers in the UK have the pound
sterling sign on the `3' key. Some older UK systems, when you press
Shift-3, generate the ASCII value 35 (`23h' in hexadecimal notation),
which outside the UK is the code for a `hash', `number', `tic-tac-toe',
or `noughts and crosses' sign. Newer systems, when you press Shift-3,
produce 163 (A3h), which is NOT an ASCII value but the ISO 8859-1 code
for the pound sterling symbol.

All three of the characters in the message quoted by Alisha are produced
by non-ASCII values (163, 172, and 166), and therefore will display
differently on different kinds of computers. They appear as a lowercase u
acute (u'), a `1/4' sign, and a Spanish feminine ordinal sign on many DOS
machines, and as a pound sterling sign, a `logical NOT' sign, and a
broken vertical bar on machines that use ISO 8895-1. The second two will
be something else on a Mac (I don't have a chart of the Mac's native
character set handy, but I think the pound sterling sign has the same
value in that set as in ISO 8859-1).

The pound sterling sign being on the keyboard I can understand, though I
think it should be set up so you type it with the Alt key, and Shift-3
gives you the hash/number sign. What a `logical NOT' sign is doing on
anybody's keyboard I have no idea; and why a single or shifted keystroke
should produce an ISO 8859-1 vertical bar (which is always a broken bar)
instead of an ASCII vertical bar (which may be solid or broken) is beyond
me.
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Briggs C A (cab...@essex.ac.uk) wrote --

> do ASCII artists type all the pictures or do they create them from
  software, converting from a b/w image or something? I mean, it's really
  amazing to make these pictures. I'm just curious to know. Maybe the
  answer is top secret.

...to which Sven Guckes (guc...@banach.math.fu-berlin.de) gave a humorous
10-step answer, which Aris Merquoni (fla...@hotmail.com) seems to have
taken seriously.

My good Briggs, we type most of the pictures. A few are done by
conversion, and a few of the converted pics are touched up manually by
people possessing as much talent as good type-from-scratch artists.

Aris, your computer does not scan material as a TIFF file. Your scanner
produces a bitmap and sends it to the computer, and the software you use
just happens to be designed, or set, to save bitmaps as TIFF files.

We can't take you anywhere, Sven.
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Planer (pla...@odyssey.net) wrote --

> I'm with you in that the newsgroups aren't really the place for html
> code as it shows little regard for the people using unix or readers
> that don't handle the html.

I've never roamed the Web with anything BUT DOS and Un*x, so don't go
saying Un*x can't handle HTML.

As for HTML tags in newsgroups, yes, out, o-u-t OUT! And I say that as
someone who uses a Web browser to read Usenet. My browser doesn't
*render* HTML in news posts, mind you, and I wouldn't want it to, because
I want to see *exactly* what the writer wrote, not a browser-dependent
rendition. It *is* nice when people put complete URLs in news posts,
though, 'cuz my browser highlights proper-looking URLs and lets me
activate them the same way I activate links on a Web page.

Dan Strychalski   dsk...@cameonet.cameo.com.tw

Related ASCII art in the Gallery

Explore these categories from our collection of 11,000+ artworks:

|\/\/\/|
|      |
|      |
| (o)(o)
C      _)
 | ,___|
 |   /
/____\

|HHHHH/"\"\HHHHHHH|
|HH`\|_.-)'|/'dP,H|
|Hb.`\\_/_//'.oddH|
|HHHb|`.\/\,'|HHHH|
|HHHHHb/\/\/|HHHHH|
|"""""""""""""""""|
| |"" /\ \  / |"" |
| |__/--\ \/  __| |

  _________
 /___   ___\
//@@@\ /@@@\\
\\@@@/ \@@@//
 \___ " ___/
    | - |
     \_/  jrjc

  ______
 /|_||_\`.__
(   _    _ _\
=`-(_)--(_)-'
         hjw

   .="=.
 _/.-.-.\_ 
( ( o o ) )
 |/  "  \| 
  \'---'/jgs  
  /`"""`\\ 

 _________
|  _____  |\
| |\ ___| | \
| | |   | | |
| | |___| | |
\ | |____\| |
 \|_________|
 Andy Johnson

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