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Font for PC graphics characters

Newsgroups:  gmane.linux.debian.user
Date:        Mon, 08 May 2006 20:48:39 -0400

> >> which font is capable of showing the PC graphics characters (ie ascii art)? >
> > Well, if you want to display ASCII, then every font known to
> > man, basically, will display it. So ASCII art isn't the
> > trouble. It's probably characters that are outside of the
> > ASCII range that are troubling you.
>
> Yes, exactly, those PC graphics characters/symbols.

Do you mean the box drawing characters?

That's not the same thing as ascii art.

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

cga2000

Font for PC graphics characters

> which font is capable of showing the PC graphics characters (ie
> ascii art)?

> Strange, I can't find such info in google, maybe I didn't use
> the right keywords...

I think that the keyword you want is ansi art, not ascii art.

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

This used ANSI.SYS in ms-dos.

There are, of course, ways of imitating this in an xterm. But the easiest is to display such pictures in an MS-DOS environment (i.e. dosemu).

Jan Willem Stumpel

Font for PC graphics characters

Jan Willem Stumpel on Wed, May 10, 2006 at 05:06:20PM +0200:

> > 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).

yes, you're right.. and ESC(B to return to regular display mode..

> or
>
>  -- a utf-8 capable xterm

that's precisely what I am running..

> 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

not bad at all with the font I normally use (terminus-12)

I tried smaller fonts but they don't seem to have all the box drawing characters - in any case the results were not quite as good as with terminus-12.

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

don't tell me.. I run debian sarge (stable) and try as I may I was never able to install from source the "debian way". So I had to go through a lot of contortions to install not just xterm but also recent versions of screen, elinks, etc. without breaking my system.. hopefully..

>   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.

I ran it on a 256-color xterm.. not sure whether that helps, though..

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

easiest for someone that has a degree of familiarity with dos. I'm sure installing dosemu is no big deal on a debian box.. presumably a simple apt-get install would do it.. but then, I would have to initialize some form of dos file system.. import the .ans files.. not easy when you have zero experience with dos.. :-)

cga2000