Request: Mac ASCII Software(art)

Although I'm not too talented, I love tinkering with ascii art.. Put the 
programs that seem to exsist for the mac... ASCIIpainter/MacGIFFscii are 
pretty lame... MacGIFscii is ok for gifs, but painter cant even handle 80 
cols :P

Does anyone know of any good editors for ascii art on the mac? or are 
willing to write one? ;)

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In article <4396oh$qf...@news.wwa.com> esi...@emerald.tufts.edu
(The Phantazm) wrote:

> Although I'm not too talented, I love tinkering with ascii art.. Put the 
> programs that seem to exsist for the mac... ASCIIpainter/MacGIFFscii are 
> pretty lame... MacGIFscii is ok for gifs, but painter cant even handle 80 
> cols :P
> 
> Does anyone know of any good editors for ascii art on the mac? or are 
> willing to write one? ;)

I've been playing with ideas for a new bitmap to ascii/ANSI/etc editor
which I'll make as portable as I can (I'll throw the source at Scarecrow
if he'll have it on his site when I've finished). I'll do my best to make
it work on the Mac; the main reason I got interested is that my machine
(an Acorn Risc PC) is a bit non-standard, and so I can only use converters
which are in source form.

I've got a number of interesting ideas; I'll post more info when I've
got more code written. The basic concept is a program which can be used
from the command line or in interactive mode for drawing ascii-art, and
for converting various picture formats to ascii-art. It would also
support vt100, ANSI text and Teletext modes, and animations. I'll leave
the source available for people to play with as they wish, but I won't
go into my algorithms too much until I've implemented everything, since
I'd like some credit for what I produce.

If anybody has any requests for facilities in such a package, please
mail me, and I'll see what I can build in. The same applies to ideas
from existing packages which are particularly useful; I haven't seen
any ascii drawing packages because I can't use them on my machine (I've
always just coped with a text editor), and the only greyscale converter
which I've got hold of in source form is not terribly impressive (i.e.
it does 1 pixel = 1 character, which is hardly optimal). I know there
are better converters around, 'cause some GIFSCII postings here are
noticeably smoothed, but I'm "working blind" in that I can't see what's
out there already.

I'm not all that talented at ASCII-art myself, and I know a converter
can never substitute for a good artist. However, converters and ascii
paint packages (never had one work, btw - could anyone give me some info
on features and sample output?) can speed things up, and can be a great
help to someone who just wants to send a diagram or a representation of
something in a mail message or news posting. They also make life a lot
easier for animations, and for design of text-based interfaces. I also
have a little idea for a web server which fetches pages and converts
all the graphics to text (sort of Lynx on steroids), which would be very
useful to people with text-only terminals, such as I had at university.
Any other ideas, please let me know.

A couple of fundamental queries, if anybody would be kind enough to
mail me:

i)  In view of the legal problems with GIF, what graphic formats would
    be most popular? PBM and BMP are trivial, and I will gladly put GIF
    in so long as I don't get prosecuted for it, but what would people
    find most useful? I don't have details of PNG, and JPEG may be a bit
    awkward.

ii) Can anyone give me detail of what Figlet does? I get the general
    concept, and would like to build in support for Figlet fonts (with
    the permission of the author(s) of Figlet, if they're willing).
    However, since I can't run Figlet (and haven't found the source
    available anywhere), the details are lost on me.

Thanks very much, everyone. I hope somebody finds this useful when
I'm done.

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