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THE.ASCII.ART.EMPORIUM

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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.
.:.
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.: : : :
.' : : '.
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':'' : '''... '.
'. : ''':.