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Here are a few tips, that taken together, can make an instant
ASCII artist out of anybody:
o A quick way to make a pic is to photocopy a drawing onto plastic.
Place the plastic over your monitor to act as a guide for placing
characters.
o Ease your work by making a file full of lines of spaces. Now copy
that file. Open a copy and start working. You'll see that it's
easier because you can now go where you want and replace the
spaces with characters. You have eliminated endless space bar
pressing. Remember to strip all trailing spaces when you're done.
o Use a mouse to move more quickly from character to character and
to delete bunches of characters and large numbers of lines.
o To avoid variation in characters, weights, and shapes found between
different fonts, use the following characters:
/ ! ( ) ? = + - _ : ; , .
o Use 'block editing' if you can. Some software allows for a square
or rectangular chunk of text to be cut, copied and pasted.
o It may be better to work on your own computer (if it has more
appropriate hardware and-ar software), and then upload it to your
host.
Also, see Jorn's "asciitech" file, available at Jorn's FTP site
and Scarecrow's FTP, Gopher, WWW sites.
7 Are there any ASCII tools?
Not many. The Emacs editor offers some help, if you know how to
use it. There are a couple of bits of Emacs code in the Scarecrow's
FTP site. EmacsMouseCode let's you draw with a mouse, and
EmacsFigletCode let's you use Figlet within Emacs.
Q-Edit and "vedit" are ASCII editors with block cut and paste.
And TheDraw can do some ANSI tricks but is limited by RAM size.
There are Unix and DOS scripts for flipping an ASCII pic (like
"modasc" by Ric Hotchkiss). BBSdraw is available for the Amiga. So
is CygnusEd, which allows column editing. And also the TPU editor
for VAX. And then there's "mdraw.el" for GNU Emacs 19 under X, that
lets you draw ASCII with a mouse.
8 Where can I get ASCII tools?
You can get TheDraw at:
-> Host: oak.oakland.edu
Path: pub/msdos/screen
File: tdraw463.zip
URL: ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/msdos/screen/tdraw463.zip
You can get "mdraw.el" at:
-> Host: ftp.cse.psu.edu
Path: pub/flee
File: mdraw.el
URL: ftp://ftp.cse.psu.edu/pub/flee/mdraw.el
You can get Q-Edit at:
-> Host: oak.oakland.edu
Path: /pub/msdos/qedit
URL: ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/msdos/qedit
You can get Emacs Code at:
-> Host: ftp.wwa.com
Address: 198.49.174.1
Path: pub/Scarecrow/Info
URL: ftp://ftp.wwa.com/pub/Scarecrow/Info
9 Where can I find ASCII art?