http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

PC "Block ASCII's" or "High ASCII's" use the extended characters of the 16 Bit code page 437, which is a proprietary standard that was introduced by IBM in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC and MS DOS operating system. "Block" ASCII's were widely used on the PC during the 1990's until the Internet replaced BBS' as the main communication platform for "computer freaks" around the world. "Block" ASCII's were dominating the PC Text Art Scene.

Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard x3.16. You can look at "Block ASCII's" with a Text Editor using the Font "Terminal", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist (see examples below).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art

ANSI art is a computer artform that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols - all codes found in IBM codepage 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape codes that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals.

ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.

> is there a howto (of sorts) anywhere?

Not AFAIK. But xterm basically understands ansi sequences, so it should not be difficult to write a filter that would produce the picture by means of

cat xxxx.ans |filter

You could use either

 -- the special xterm mode which displays box characters
    (something like ESC(O , or something similar, forgot what it
    is).
or

-- a utf-8 capable xterm

The problem is that not only ansi sequences (for colours and cursor position) must be interpreted. xterm does this by default. But also the characters themselves must be translated from PC-DOS ("codepage 437") to the characters understood by your xterm (iso-8859-1 or utf-8).

As a quick test, I tried some of the ansi art examples in http://www.acid.org/ftp/aaa-8991.zip on my utf-8 capable xterm, simply using iconv to convert codepage 437 to utf-8, e.g.:

iconv -f 437 -t utf-8 tohs.ans

I suppose that if you have a legacy xterm with iso-8859-1 (unfortunately still the default in Debian) it would have to be

iconv -f 437 -t iso-8859-1 tohs.ans

This gives some idea of what it should look like. It becomes better when you select reverse video (control-middle click, then select reverse video). But getting the true glory of ansi art, including the proper colour scheme, would require a specially-written filter, I think.

The easiest is to just use the TYPE command in an ms-dos environment (dosemu) with ansi.sys.

Jan Willem Stumpel