ANSI Artwork¶

ANSI artwork is a kind of low-resolution graphics that is created using the ANSI character set and its related color capabilities. It is typically made for the traditional 80 columns x 24 rows character mode display available on PC graphics cards. (24 rows as the 25th bottom row was usually occupied by the status line of the Terminal_Program.

ANSI artwork can exceed far beyond its ancestor of ASCII artwork.

• wikipedia on ANSI art
• An Abbreviated History of the Underground Computer Art Scene
• 16colo.rs - Collection of ANSI art work

Editors¶

ANSI artwork can be created entirely by hand in a text editor, but it is relatively cumbersome to do so.

Over time, dedicated software for the creation of ANSI art was established.

The most well-known software at the time is probably TheDraw

TheDraw is long unmaintained/abandoned.

Today, there are open source alternatives such as

• pablodraw (.NET)
• moebius (node.js / Javascript)