![]() Plus, even with the decoded files and my editor, it took a decent amount of time to make the fonts. Sadly this means I only ported over a hand full (10 total), since a lot of ANSI’s charm is in its color. I created simple web-based FIGlet Editor to assist in the process, and ported over the fonts I felt looked best going from ANSI to FIGlet. ![]() With the fonts in hand, I decided the best thing I could do was convert them into FIGlet fonts so people could once again start using them. Roy/SAC does still have a deviantart page though, and you can see what his site used to look like at the internet archive (NSFW-ish). Aaron told me he originally grabbed the font zip from ASCII Artist Roy/SAC’s web page ( ), but that site appears to have been shutdown a year ago. After talking with Aaron, the only two sites that appear to host ANSI art font files are and, and in both cases you’ll need a special ANSI art viewer. Created for use in emails and on old BBS systems, today it appears these fonts have mostly disappeared from the internet. What was left were some pretty neat ASCII fonts from the late 80’s / early 90’s. Though I felt the colors were neat, I couldn’t figure out how TheDraw was encoding them**. This script also stripped out the color information. Since unicode is easy to display, I wrote a script to process the font files and return unicode compatible versions. This unfortunately didn’t help much, but it was cool to see the old apps in action.Īfter some more research, I learned most of IBM’s Extended ASCII characters had unicode counter parts. I ended up going through the same rigmarole I did when I was trying to get Mark Zuckerberg’s Vader Fader to work, and was able to load up the old DOS apps on a Windows 98 virtual machine. The only problem was neither of us knew how to decode the files within the zip.Īrmed with copies of TheDraw and ACiDDraw, I decided to do some ASCII archaeology. He thought I might be able to provide a place to preserve them since I’d done so for the AOL Macro fonts. The Lost FontsĪbout a year ago, someone named Aaron Haun sent me a zip containing over a hundred user created ANSI art font files from an old DOS app called TheDraw. This doesn’t mean the art form is dead though – fans of the genre have gone out of their way to create special editors and viewers so that the art can still be appreciated, but the community is much smaller than it once was. If you try to view them they just wind up looking like gibberish. ![]() These days the most editors can’t open ANSI Art files. In the 90’s unicode became the standard for encoding text, and since ANSI Art was based on IBM’s extended ASCII* character set, its presence became more and more uncommon. It gained popularity in the tech underground of the mid-80’s, and a community of artists emerged and flourished. It allows you to create text art that includes additional text characters, color, and limited animation. ANSI art is also text art, but it’s a little more special. Most people know what ASCII Art is – its art created by arranging text into pictures. ![]()
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