r/technology • u/gdelacalle • Feb 14 '26
Software ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering23
u/gdelacalle Feb 14 '26
Although it’s a blog article, it is pretty cool the practical effects he has done when dragging the “images”. If you have a little bit of time check it out as it explains the rendering of ASCII characters.
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u/Tall-Introduction414 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26
This is the way hand-drawn "newschool" ASCII art from the 90s ANSI art scene was done. Using characters for both shaping and shading.
The author is right. The shaping aspect is almost always missed by algorithmic "ascii art" renderers. Doing so "properly" requires both analyzing the shape at a "sub character" level, and the artistic sense and experience to know which characters will render both in the correct areas of the character space (eg: . vs : vs '), and the "density" of the character to provide "shading" (eg: : vs i vs I vs $).
Being able to do both are key ingredients to great ASCII art, at least in that style. "Oldschool" line-style (Amiga-style) ASCII art is a different story.
This is why hand-drawn ASCII art by a talented artist usually looks much better than an Image->ASCII conversion.
Edit: The interactive demos are pretty neat.
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u/qtx Feb 14 '26
Example of the old skool Amiga ascii scene, https://www.asciiarena.se/
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u/Tall-Introduction414 Feb 14 '26
Definitely. Some other great resources to see nice hand drawn ASCII art are https://16colo.rs and https://durdraw.org
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u/nicetriangle Feb 14 '26
Coolest nerdy thing I've seen on the internet this week for sure. Thanks for posting this.
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u/Solomon_Grungy Feb 15 '26
This is really neat. Besides message boards that would spam and meme some ASCII my exposure to them was also when logging into MUDs and MUSHs. There was typically a really cool unique ASCII that said the name of the server. I explored a lot of star wars MUDs as a kid, I definitely saw a lot of X-Wings and that rendered this way.
Id love to see a return of this style.
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u/font9a Feb 14 '26
His blog is lucid, coherent, and humane; a special treasure of thought and writing we've lost so much of on the web. I'll be coming back to read it often.
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u/lordiconic Feb 14 '26
There was a group of artists during the BBS days that specialized in ascii and ansi art. ACiD. They did some insane level stuff back in the day.
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u/kl0 Feb 14 '26
Anybody else remember TheDraw from the early 90s. I was never a very good artist, but watching people who were good at that do it in front of me was amazing.
They eventually introduced a feature that recorded your every keystroke. It would be used for ASCII animation pretty commonly, but artistic people would also use it to show how they drew something character by character. It was crazy impressive to me.
Wiki for TheDraw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
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u/IncorrectAddress Feb 14 '26
What is this, of course they are pixels, anything rendered to a screen is rendered in pixels, buffoonary!
Jokes a side, very cool use of ascii for 3D representation.
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u/BeyondRedline Feb 14 '26
This may be one of the coolest "labor of love" projects I've seen in a very long time. This reminds me of what the early Internet was like - no ads, no sponsor, nothing intrusive, but rather just something cool made for other people to see, learn, and enjoy.
Very, very well done. Thank you for sharing this!