discuss: Line Drawings, ascii art (was: Re: OpenOffice.org)
Subject:
Line Drawings, ascii art (was: Re: OpenOffice.org)
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
28 Apr 2002 05:34:52 -0000
Message-Id: <20020427151028.A326@lafn.org>
> David Lawyer wrote:
> > Diagrams can be readily drawn in "ascii graphics". Although Linuxdoc
> > supports tables, it's simpler just to make the table in ascii and use a
> > verbatim tag <verb> (something like <programlisting> in linuxdoc, <pre>
> > in html). The significant problems with the existing documentation are
> > that many are outdated and many topics are not covered. The lack of
> > bit-mapped images is not a significant problem IMO.
>
On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 10:30:01AM +0930, Glen Turner wrote:
> Can't agree. It's difficult to draw a computer network of any complexity
> in ASCII art, yet a diagram is essential if readers are to understand the
> network being presented as an example. Have a look at one of the
> configuration guides on the Cisco Systems web site.
>
This is my 2nd reply. In the previous reply I forgot about one very
significant reason why we should use ascii art instead of bit-mapped
graphics. It's because a lot of people don't have a bit-mapped setup.
Me for example.
Anyone with a text-based interface (sometimes called command-line
interface) can't use bit-mapped. This includes dumb terminals, and 486s
that are too slow for the bloated Gnome or KDE GUIs. Windows 3.1 wasn't
bloated and worked fine on my 486 but unfortunately, Linux doesn't have
anything this efficient.
If one wants to run recent OSs on an old PC, Linux is the only practical
choice. But you probably won't get a GUI. In rich countries (like the
US) it's not much of a problem but Linux is for the entire world where
many can't afford a high-powered computer. So I'll have to retract my
statement of support for svg vector graphics. But the line-drawing
character sets will work on text-interfaces and an old dumb terminal I'm
using (20 years old) has the vt100 Graphics character set built in.
Here's a brief explanation of some line-drawing characters. They are
just ordinary characters, some of which are just dashes. Why do you
need dashes when ascii has both a dash -- and an underline __ (a low
dash)? Note that two or more such dashes don't make a solid line, they
only make a dashed line. Likewise for vertical bars. But the dashes in
a line drawing character set are longer so that when put together they
form a solid line. Ditto for vertical bars. There are also corners for
boxes. Thus the art with these looks nicer especially when combined
with the ascii symbols.
To get them, you prefix a string of them with the shift-in control
character and use the shift-out character to get back to the normal
ascii. But I've noticed some of them in 8-bit character sets such as the
Russian KOI-8. So using these would mean that when translating a doc,
the translator would also need to translate line-drawing characters
since the byte-codes for them are different. That is, unless there is
software to automate this.
David Lawyer
