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THE.ASCII.ART.EMPORIUM

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The American Standard Code for Information Interchange supplies a
character-assignment for each number from zero to 127 (7F in
hexadecimal). As I understand it, Internet protocols are optimized
for this seven-bit range--if you're trying to ftp an eight-bit-wide
file, you have to specially request 'binary' transmission. (So the
opposite of binary, here, is *ASCII*.)
Only the numbers from 32 to 126 (20 to 7E hex) are defined as
*printable* characters (the others are defined as control codes):
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
=--------------------------------
2 | ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / <- <- <- 20 hex is the
3 | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? blankspace
4 | @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
5 | P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
6 | ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o 7F is non-printing
7 | p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~ <- in the US ("rubout")
Unfortunately, this narrow standard ignored the needs of many other
cultures: the British 'pound' sign, letters with accents in French
and Scandinavian alphabets, etc., which led them to introduce slight
modifications to the standard, making the following symbols (at
least) non-universal:
{^ ` { curly brace 1 ^ caret ` backquote
#| } # hatch/hash mark | pipe } curly brace 2
~\ ~ tilde \ backslash
]$[@ [square brackets] $ dollarsign @ at-sign
[The test-graphic is vaguely a woman with a rose in her teeth, on my
screen anyway...]
Furthermore, even within the US, different typefaces assign
significantly different shapes to some characters, for example:
"|" (C7) is sometimes drawn as a continuous line, sometimes broken
in the middle.
...@... ...@... (So this becomes a
"^" (5E) may be anything from ..@.@.. to ..@.@.. 'Pinocchio' smiley:
....... .@...@. { ;^)
Similarly with "<" and ">". ....... @.....@ (...doesn't it?))
Depending on your character set, any of these may be the blackest
black: @#%* (I'm often seeing people choosing "#", which on my
screen looks totally blotchy.)
Any of these may display at different heights: ~^*-=+
Lettershapes may have serifs or not, and ascenders and descenders
may be straight or curved. (Proportionally-spaced fonts, as opposed
to monospaced, are of course *hopeless*. On the Mac, I favor Monaco
9, for its simplicity. Courier is another normally-monospaced
family.)
Even monospaced fonts may display with different aspect ratios
(v:h), at least within GUIs, which can turn circles into ellipses
and squares into rectangles. Different newsreaders may space the
lines differently, too, with the same outcome. (What was the IBM-
monochrome aspect-ratio?)
For Internet transmission, you can assume the display is 80
characters wide, although if you trim this a bit it will allow
images to be e-quoted without wrap-around. (If you use all 80, can
the CR cause wraparound in some pagers?)
Normal screen height is 24 or 25 lines, but when you're laying out a
page you should assume you'll use a control-L before and after each
screenful of text, to maintain the alignment, and this turns out to
limit the height to 22 lines.
*********************************************
Line-draw vs. greyscale character palettes
*********************************************
Most ascii art so far has leaned almost entirely on less than twenty
of the available characters-- what might be called the 'line-draw'
character palette:
/ \ | - _ =
. : ' ` " ~
< > ( ) [ ]
Here's a cute example of the potential of this palette, a pastiche
that re-combines an incredibly cool self-portrait by Jonggu Moon and
a state-of-the-art dragon (off rec.games.mud, I think, but I got it
2ndhand and missed the credit). Notice, though, how the lines are
mostly the same weight, creating a flatness:
_ __,----'~~~~~~~~~`-----.__
. . `//====-_ ___,-' `
-. \_|// . /||\\ `~~~~`---.___./
______-==. _-~o~ \/ ||| \\ _,'`
__,--' ,=='||\=_ ;_--~/_-'|- |`\ \\ ,'
_-' ' | \\`. '-'~7 /- / || `\. /
.' //// || | \\ \_ / /- / || \ /