JAVE

July 10, 2001 12:17 PM

JAVE is an tool that helps ease the pain of creating ASCII art. In the days before GIFs, ASCII art roamed the plains of the Internet; people created hundreds of text-based pictures. Some spectacular examples are out there, but the rise of the graphical web has put a crimp in this art form. Perhaps tools like JAVE and FIGlet can help stave off the end.
posted by snarkout (13 comments total)

obligatory reference to ascii pr0n... don't forget, you can run figlet from your shell as well. If there aren't enough figlet fonts to suit you, you can make your own
posted by jessamyn at 12:41 PM on July 10, 2001

Back in the BBS days, I used to manually create "high ASCII" (or extended ASCII) art, which used the special characters displayed when you held down the ALT key, hit a three number sequence on the number keypad, and release the ALT key.

It still working in the Windows age. Try starting a DOS window, turn off NumLock, and try typing the following:

[alt-176] [alt-177] [alt-178] [alt-219] [alt-179] [m] [alt-250] [e] [alt-250] [alt-159] [alt-250] [i] [alt-179] [alt-219] [alt-178] [alt-177] [alt-176]
posted by waxpancake at 12:42 PM on July 10, 2001

Just the thing for Ice Cream Day.
posted by frykitty at 12:45 PM on July 10, 2001

don't forget www.asciibabes.com (not rated x, dont worry if you're at work like me)
posted by pinto at 12:45 PM on July 10, 2001

When I was a wee lass, I took a computer class that involved hand-coding graphics in characters representing each permutation of on/off pixels in a 2x3 grid. I believe we were working on TRS-80s, and we had special graph paper for working out our designs.
posted by redfoxtail at 12:52 PM on July 10, 2001

Which, crap, was linked to from here before.
posted by jbushnell at 12:57 PM on July 10, 2001

But if it isn't hard to do, doesn't that diminish the coolness of ASCII art?
posted by jpoulos at 1:11 PM on July 10, 2001

I miss good old fashioned Warlording...
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 1:16 PM on July 10, 2001

self portrait (2001)

                               kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
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posted by iceberg273 at 1:32 PM on July 10, 2001

Let's not forget png2html.
posted by riffola at 1:40 PM on July 10, 2001

Back in the day I used to do ascii art (yes, by hand) for one of the many computer art groups out there. Get a request from someone's BBS, bust out AcidDraw, & crank out some pretty cool looking stuff (if I do say so myself). Much of it's still available out there somewhere, if you feel like looking around artpacks.acid.org for awhile (hint: get this zip file, get a viewer and look for any file starting with "ze-" -- ignore the stupid comments and remember I was 16 at the time :).

It was fun stuff & led to me meeting some cool people, but the popularization of the web pretty much led to the downfall of the text-based BBS & thus me not drawing anymore. Still, it's kind of interesting to see things like this.. ahh, the memories :)
posted by zempf at 2:19 PM on July 10, 2001

Yes, I did it back in the day too, with my C128D. I initially did all of them by hand with ZED-128, a text editor. Then I found a program that would convert geoPaint pictures to ASCII, and I was blown away. "Earth in Hand", one available through my link, was done this way - not bad for line art.

ASCII art was fun. Still is. Be sure to see afn.org too - lots of GEnieUS there.
posted by hijinx at 3:01 PM on July 10, 2001