How to Maintain the Size of ASCII Art From Terminal to Terminal

ASCII art is composed with ASCII characters such as slashes, dashes and punctuation. ASCII Arts is created using text editors and shared via email and chat clients. The appearance of art composed on one computer application may appear differently on another computer application if either do not use a fixed width character set. This is because the space that each character takes up on the screen varies depending on what the character is, resulting in some lines of ASCII art text becoming shifted. To maintain the size of the image, it's important to use fixed width characters.

Instructions

1. Determine whether the application you are using to view or compose ASCII Art, such a web browser or email client, is capable of handling fixed-width fonts. Not all programs do and the lack of a fixed-width option may distort your ASCII art viewing.

2. Change the applications you use on each terminal to display text as fixed width. The method varies depending on the application but is straightforward to find from the application menu. Click on "Edit," "View" or "Options" from the application menu and then find the "Fonts" section.

3. Set your application fonts to use the Western European character set, which provides your program with the tools to display ASCII art correctly.

4. Pick a fixed-width font family such as Lucida Console on the terminals and applications you use to view ASCII Art.

Tips & Warnings

• Use any available fixed-width font to ensure ASCII Art displays correctly, including Andale Mono, Courier New, Lucida Sans Typewriter or OCR Extended.

References

• ASCII-Art: Alt ASCII Art FAQ
• Vlaurie.com: Cast of Characters- ASCII, ANSI, UTF-8 and all that