anyone know some good software for drawing ANSI art? I've been meaning to get into it, it seems so very interesting.
on another note, I recently came across this very nice, lightweight (1.5MB with all fonts installed) ASCII art program written in Java called "JavE" that redefines the traditional text-editor interface in favor of something more mouse-focused, acting more like any other "regular" art program. I haven't made anything with it yet, but it's been super fun to play around with. It has FIGlet integration, a bunch of fun little tools and toys, it even comes with tetris! you can check it out at:
Though I'm still looking for a nice, equally lightweight program that allows me to draw ANSI art. It should preferably have a linux version, though I'm not against using Wine (or, *shivering* DOSbox) to run it if it's old enough. I just want something that works well and lets me choose colors + non-keyboard characters in an intuitive way. (Please, no web-based tools! I've had enough of those!)
Let me know if you know or find anything interesting and thank you in advance! :°3
Nov 29 · 2 weeks ago
7 Comments ↓
There is the questions: What features do you want (e.g. file formats (it seem that you want ANSI, although there are other formats), doorway mode, layers, custom fonts/palettes, etc)? (I wrote a "cbgconv" program which can convert between many character-based graphics formats, so that might also be useful (if the file format is the only issue), although it will not be useful by itself; you will still need another program.)
I had no idea there could be more than two formats!! I'm very new to this, lol.. No idea what doorway mode is, layers are nice but not necessary, I don't really care about custom fonts since I'm likely gonna be displaying the drawings I make on my capsule, soo.. :P The only thing I find essential aside from usual ANSI format stuff is being able to pick the characters I want from a selection screen of sorts, mostly for block and half-block characters! But that's it, really.. I've tried aewan and it does seem to have ANSI capability, but i haven't figured out how to select the colors that I want...
Does ASCII Draw count? I guess it depends if you consider Flatpaks "too heavy".
ASCII Draw has that mouse drawing stuff, including separate "colours" on both mouse buttons, and premade fonts (don't know if they're figlet though). It also gets pretty regular updates.
I also have a much more wacky idea, which I've actually done before. It involves the GNU Image Manipulation Program and is really only suitable for the "bitmap converted to shaded text" style text art as opposed to the "drawing" style.
Make a drawing in GIMP and export it as an XPM image. Open the XPM image in a text editor to reveal what an XPM really is: text art wrapped in some code. You can then extract that art and do some find-and-replace to make it look the way you want.
When you look into ANSI art you will find that a lot of the software is geared towards making art for a specific retro font/charset to display on BBS servers like Commodore or Amiga. This is different from ASCII Art editors like JavE that make plaintext that can be copy-pasted anywhere.
Here are some names that you can search for:
- Playscii
- Rexpaint
- Petmate
- Moebius (and the fork MoebiusXBIN)
- Durdraw (a TUI, but a good option for unicode ANSI)
- lvllvl (a web editor, but this is the best one)
Check out this page too which is a good primer:
https://polyducks.co.uk/pages/what-is-textmode/
If you're using JavE (which is an incredible piece of software!) make sure you grab v6.0RC2 which is the last version to be released and is a significant improvement over v5.
http://www.jave.de/developer/index.html
OH HI MOZZ THANK YOU!! i've been using durdraw recently and it's been great! just had some trouble pasting the output into gemtext, still trying to figure out how to fix that...