ANSI art is a computer artform widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM codepage 437, a superset of ASCII used in MS-DOS environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape codes that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for terminal emulation. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto .ANS file extension.

ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.

The popularity of ANSI art encouraged the creation of a powerful shareware package called TheDraw coded by Ian E. Davis in 1986. Not only did it considerably simplify the process of making an ANSI art screen from scratch, but it also included a variety of "fonts", large letters constructed from box and block characters, and transition animations such as dissolve and clock. Mysteriously, no new versions of TheDraw emerged after version 4.63 in 1993, but in later years a number of other ANSI editors appeared, some of which are still maintained today.

The decline of both BBSes and DOS users has made it difficult for many users to even view ANSI animations. As a consequence, this form of art is no longer practiced to the degree it once was.

The popular computer game ZZT consisted of ANSI graphics and was extremely moddable, allowing users to take their own artistic liberties with the game design tools.

ANSI art editors

• ACiDDraw
• PabloDraw
• Tetradraw A fully featured ANSI art editor for *nix operating systems.
• TheDraw 4.63 A page which distributes TheSoft's TheDraw
• TundraDraw A cross-platform ANSI and ASCII editor for Microsoft Windows and X environments. Source code available.
• SHMANSI Note: That is archive.org version since the real page ( http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/Heights/1651/ ) doesn't seem to be there anymore. It can also be downloaded here under the name shm180-b.zip.

ANSI art viewers

• ACiD View for Windows An image viewer for Microsoft Windows which supports several formats including ANSI art and ANSI animation; includes source code; compatible with Windows 9X.
• PabloView for Windows A powerful viewer similar to that of ACiD View; requires .NET Framework.

Further reading

• Danet, Brenda "Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online". [1]

ISBN 1-85973-424-3.

Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001.

• "Dark Domain: the artpacks.acid.org collection". [2]

ISBN 0-9746537-0-5. DVD-ROM.

San Jose, CA, USA: ACiD Productions, LLC, 2004.

See also

• AVATAR

External links

• A detailed table of the character set in IBM code page 437
• ANSI standard X3.64 technical specifications
• ansiart.org.ua: Modest gallery of ANSI pictures and information about the art
• Sixteencolors.net: A comprehensive on-line gallery of ANSI artwork from 1989 to present day. (registration required)