Mar 25, 2024
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An effortpost on making ASCII art in 2021
Because an anon asked how to get started and where to find the characters, and I accidentally removed their ask when typing my response.
The characters you want to use depends on what kind of ASCII you want to make, and where you'll be posting it!
This site contains all "printable" and "extended" ASCII characters, and their corresponding Alt codes for easy typing. Printable characters are everything you see labeled on a physical QWERTY keyboard, and are the only characters you can use if you are using a non-variable width font such as Courier. Extended are characters like ƒ and ®.
This is what Courier/code font looks like. Every ASCII character is the same width, so any ASCII you make like this will retain its form if you post it in Discord, Twitch, other sites with a "code" function. The tradeoff is you have less detail to work with unless you make the ASCII art huge.
This generator turns uploaded images into "dot matrix" ASCII that only use periods. You commonly see these in Twitch chat and such.
The art I make uses the non-variable width font Arial. Non-variable width fonts are what you see everywhere these days; this tumblr post is using non-variable width! You can get more detailed ASCII art out of these fonts, but you can only reliably copy/paste them in very few online spaces (which is why I can only share my art via screenshots). No one has yet made an ASCII generator in this style; everything is made manually. I have collected a list of tutorials on my site that cover this style and the most useful characters in the extended ASCII table. I’ll probably make one myself sooner or later.
If you want to go even further beyond, Kaomoji is big right now.
(´｡• ω •｡`)
Where the old-school western emoticon game stalled over a decade ago, Japanese emoticons have proliferated. These use a combination of ASCII and Unicode characters. You might think of Unicode as “literally everything you don’t see in the ASCII table." There are shortcuts for inserting Unicode characters on Windows desktop, which this Microsoft article goes into a lot of detail about (as well as inserting plain ASCII characters). Since Unicode covers thousands of characters, I can't make any recommendations on how to find ones you like, which is why I linked the Kaomoji site which will let you curate specific characters.
I have little personal advice to offer anyone who wants to go full weeb and learn Japanese ASCII art, better known as AA, technically known as Shift_JIS (SJIS) Art. Even the few but persistent Japanese users who still make AA use specialized software that's tuned to the format of the image boards they post their work on. Like Kaomoji though, here is a site that archives more AA than I've seen anywhere else, along with the source text so you can copy/paste, and curate characters. It's...kind of a pain to use, but even if you just want to look at AA, it's a pro click. Beyond that, you can also follow AA makers on Twitter and maybe even ask them questions! For search references, the tag for AA on Twitter and Pixiv is "#アスキーアート".
Will update and reblog this post if I think of more info but that's the large of it. I have trouble keeping to an update schedule for this blog but I will answer any asks in a short time so please ask any questions you have!
Mistigram: a regretful reprint from our back stacks, rest in power to jazz titan #SonnyRollins, whose 1957 album #SaxophoneColossus was here celebrated in #ShiftJIS by @kalchano in the music-themed MIST0118 artpack collection eight years ago.
“やじうまの杜”では、ニュース・レビューにこだわらない幅広い話題をお伝えします。
Unicodeの出始めの時期とか、JISとShift JISとUnicodeがごちゃまぜになっていて、そりゃーもー大変でしたねー。(苦笑)
Mistigram: and surely you saw it leading the MIST0218 teaser trailer, but if not here you go, we gently animated @kalchano's tres '90s suite of still #Shift_JIS images to tell the tale of a lonely man and the low-resolution nude pictures he slowly downloaded.
“Mistigram: Kalcha takes us back again, this time to 1957, with this #Shift_JIS adaptation of the cover art (included) to #MilesDavis' hard bop album #Walkin', released in the recent MIST0118 artpack collection.”
“Mistigram: no more Springsteen, but here's Kalcha giving his #Shift_JIS treatment to another #HerbieHancock album, his 1973 #Sextant.”
Kalcha brings out more Herbie Hancock with this Shift_JIS rearrangement of the album art to 1973's "Sextant", from the MIST0118 artpack!