text
stringlengths 0
4k
|
|---|
Simple antialiasing is actually very easy to do and can often be achieved with
|
periods/commas and apostrophes/accents/quotation marks alone. Just add these
|
when there's a rough corner and it looks much better. Sometimes you may want to
|
use more characters. I use d, b and n (sometimes m) for the upper parts of
|
objects and + for lower parts, the plus doesn't look too good, but it's the
|
best I've found. q and p can be used to match d and b, but they hang lower. P
|
is better, but it has no equivalent for the left side. Demoscene artists often
|
use a wider variety of antialiasing characters, such as 7, 4, \, / and %.
|
88888
|
88888888888
|
8888888888888
|
8888888888888
|
8888888888888
|
88888888888
|
88888
|
A filled circle without antialiasing
|
.nd888bn.
|
.d888888888b.
|
8888888888888
|
8888888888888
|
8888888888888
|
`+888888888+'
|
`"+888+"'
|
The same circle with antialiasing
|
3.6 Tracing
|
In the ancient times, people sometimes drew/copied the picture on a
|
transparency first, which they taped on the screen to be able to trace the
|
image as well as possible. I used this technique once, when I needed to make an
|
ASCII out of a map and first I traced the picture from a book, but I didn't
|
have a transparency so I used a plastic bag, perhaps needless to say the
|
results weren't excellent.
|
When Netscape Composer came out, some people figured out that they could just
|
set the image file as the page background and draw over it. Now we have JavE,
|
which has a particular function just for this, you can set the display size and
|
aspect ratio of the image file and apply some brightness/contrast tweaks.
|
3.7 Aspect ratio
|
Aspect ratio is something to pay attention to, particularly because of the
|
differences between the fonts. Practically all fonts are taller than they're
|
wide, so a picture of 10 lines and 10 columns probably won't look rectangular.
|
Fixed-width fonts in general are of roughly the same width, but Topaz New is
|
considerably more narrow, while Courier and its descendants are very fat. Most
|
people have their web browsers set to use Courier, so some pictures may look
|
unneededly fat, but this is partly unavoidable. Just pay attention to this if
|
you're drawing ASCII for a particular purpose or if you're using Courier or
|
Topaz to draw. One way to solve this is not to draw pictures that are supposed
|
to be exactly circular or square and a different angle can help too. One of my
|
ASCII pictures looks just fine in both 80x25 and 80x50 fullscreen resolutions,
|
even though the 80x50 font is twice as wide.
|
3.8 Difficulties and limitations
|
Some things are very hard to do in ASCII, some of these are obvious and some
|
not so obvious. Slanted, almost vertical lines are very hard and usually end up
|
looking stupid, so it's a good idea to avoid them whenever possible. Completely
|
straight vertical lines are often better. The same problem doesn't apply for
|
slanted horizontal lines at all, those are very easy to do once you learn to
|
use different characters correctly.
|
Things with a high resolution/detail are also hard, things like small spirals.
|
That's why you sometimes need to drop the detail (or draw the picture in a
|
bigger resolution). You also can't properly represent blurriness or softness,
|
or at least that's extremely difficult. You can do some optical illusions in
|
ASCII, such as stereograms. Magic eye pictures are probably not possible,
|
excluding very high resolutions.
|
3.9 Perspective, 3D and isometric ASCII
|
Some ASCII pictures feature a perspective, but it's often a very simple one and
|
limited to lines. In a way, a lot of ASCII art could be called naivistic. Even
|
a simple perspective improves the picture, though. A good way for creating a
|
perspective is drawing the lines so that they would continue to this imaginary
|
perspective point, which can be located in the middle of the picture or
|
elsewhere. Isometric ASCII art exists too. JavE has a feature that can render
|
3D shapes in ASCII art, as wireframes or with a simple lighting.
|
.:.
|
.::'.
|
: : : '.
|
.' : : '.
|
.' : : '.
|
: : : '.
|
.: : : :
|
.' : : '.
|
.' : : :
|
: : : '.
|
.' : : '.
|
.' : ...:. '.
|
: ......::''''' '''... '.
|
':'' : '''... '.
|
'. : ''':.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.