ASCII art is the [art](art.md) of (mostly manually) creating graphics and images only out of [fixed-width](fixed_width.md) (monospace) [ASCII](ascii.md) characters. Strictly speaking this means no [Unicode](unicode.md) or extended ASCII characters are allowed -- these would rather be called Unicode art, [ANSI art](ansi_art.md) etc., though the term ASCII art is quite often used loosely for any art of this kind. If we keep being pedantic, ASCII art might also be seen as separate from mere [ASCII rendering](ascii_rendering.md), i.e. automatically rendering a bitmap image with ASCII characters in place of [pixels](pixel.md), and ASCII graphics that utilizes the same techniques as ASCII art but can't really be called art (e.g. computer generated diagrams); though in practice this distinction is also rarely made. Pure ASCII art is [plain text](plain_text.md), i.e. it can't make use of [color](color.md), text decoration and other [rich text](rich_text.md) formatting.
This kind of art used to be a great part of the [culture](culture.md) of earliest [Internet](internet.md) communities for a number of reasons imposed largely by the limitations of old computers -- it could be created easily with a text editor and saved in pure text format, it didn't take much space to store or send over a network and it could be displayed on text-only displays and terminals. The principle itself predates computers, people were already making this kind of images with type writers. Nevertheless the art survives even to present day and lives on in the hacker culture, among [programmers](programming.md), in [Unix](unix.md) communities, on the [Smol Internet](smol_internet.md) etc. ASCII diagram may very well be embedded e.g. in a comment in a source code to explain some spatial concept -- that's pretty [KISS](kiss.md). We, [LRS](lrs.md), highly advocate use of ASCII art whenever it's [good enough](good_enough.md).
Here is a simple 16-shade ASCII [palette](palette.md) (but watch out, whether it works will depend on your font): `#OVaxsflc/!;,.- `. Another one can be e.g.: `WM0KXkxocl;:,'. `.
Here are approximate brightness values for each printable ASCII character, with 0 being black and 1000 white (of course the values always depend on the specific [font](font.md) you use):
{ I obtained the values by shooting a screen with some generic monospace font in gedit or something, then made a script that computed the values and ordered them. ~drummyfish }
