h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An entry on ASCII Art - there's far more to it than just smileys : - )

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A525791

I think it's possible that this entry may have some problems with the copyright rules -- people's drawings (even ASCII art) *are* copyrighted. The fact that a large chunk of the entry is spent duplicating other people's artwork would probably be an issue.

Mikey

Hmm. Possibly. Whats the situation if I can get permission from each artist?

I love this entry. Great examples. I just *wuv* that cat! And the statue is cool too.

{all comments by non-lawyer: use at own risk}

If you can get permission, then it'll be fine. This may be easier said than done: read the copyright notice to see what you'll be asking them to give away.

Note that ASCII art which has been "copylefted", et al, isn't permissable on h2g2: the GPL etc tend to conflict with the terms of h2g2. Public domain ASCII Art, however, is OK.

You are likely to be better off merely linking to places where the ASCII Art images are hosted, though - it'll be easier than collecting permission emails.

On a more h2g2-specific note, entries tend to be accepted faster where they show substantial quantities of original work - entries which mainly copy uncopyrighted text do happen (see, eg, UN decl on Human Rights) - but are comparatively rare. Think how you might "add value"...

Hmm. This probably isn't suitable for the guide then. The point of it is to show people the sorts of things that can be done with ASCII art (and if all someone's seen is smileys, the things that are possible are really stunning). Unfortunately, I can't do that without including some art - links wouldn't be followed unless you already know that its more interesting than lists of smileys.

Substantial original work - well one of the pictures is one of mine, but I couldn't just fill up the entry with my work (you'd only see one style). I could write some sort of tutorial for making ASCII art, but thats not the intention of the entry - and there are plenty of tutorials out on the net if someone is interested in it already.

Incidentally, I'm told that h2g2 is dealing with the tags in an illegal way (i.e. not proper html standard). It puts font size tags inside the pre tags, apparently it should be doing something like: ...stuff...

For the non-HTML standard , go bother the people on the Bugs page...

I think it is suitable, and it'd be a good addition... but I think (and this is more IMO than anything else) any such entry has to be slightly more than "Here's some art. And here's some more art. And here's even more art." - that's not to say it should include NO art - but that it should have some other stuff there as well!

For example, a link to some of the web tutorials would be good, or other collectons of the stuff. Discussion of differing styles would be good. Discussion, perhaps, of what types of things are easiest or hardest to 'draw'. I'm not an afficionado, myself, so I can't give many ideas... but hopefully you get the idea?

You say that programs which convert to ascii art tend to need the artwork tweeking, but a freind of mine (jim felix) got into the local paper (the lincolshire standard) back in the eighties for writting a program that would take any bbc micro screen, and convert it into a large ascii picture, and they didn't need tweeking. I suspect that the ones that need tweeking are either high resolution grey scale, or many colours. if you stick to low res (240x320x8 colours) then you can produce perfectly reasonable ansii art that needs no tweeking at all, all in the block type of pictures. (like the old snoopy pic)

Reply to Lucinda:

Well, its got the technical definition, a bit of history, uses and some bits of technique...the latter bit on examples is just art, but there is quite a lot else there!

I'll see about putting some more stuff in maybe, but I don't really want to put the time in if the copyright issues will scupper it anyway.

Reply to xyroth:

Well yeah, if you have the picture resolution low enough and the ascii large enough, then you just convert pixels to characters. If you want something to post to a newsgroup though, you've got a maximum width (around 72 characters I think?), which isn't many pixels.

Good point, I'll add it.

I like it!
Reminds me of the ole BBS times when you were greeted by some ASCII graphics when entering or leaving a BBS.
Tube

come look at my page for a piece of original ASCII art.

Yeah,

There actually are a fair number of automatic ascii art generation programs out there. In perhaps the silliest programming stunt a few years back, somebody modified the shooting-game Quake (it was open source later) to optionally output to a text terminal (so every screen was rendered as Ascii art) using one of these programs. It was pretty ugly, and not very practical of course, but it was apparently somewhat playable.

Here's the link. Hopefully it won't be moderated away [URL removed by moderator]

Yours,
Jake

Ascii art has even conquered live video

Try looking at slashdot.org - apparently some otherwise underemployed hackers
came up with a program to convert a live video signal to ascii art-style 80x25
character frames (it's even possible they supported other screen formats).
If the link is still alive, you might even get a live sample.

I seem to recall they did it for Doom, too. Fun stuff, and more playable since there's one less dimension to worry about.

Some people have too much time on their hands...

Boring Guy: Do you have any idea what that article was called? I can't seem to find it.

I seem to remember that someone was putting star wars (the trench run in the first film) into ascii. and by hand too.

It's been a while (couple of months at least), so the details
escape me [fires up a new mozilla window at slashdot], but
a quick search turns up "The ASCII cam", posted january 26.
Even looks like the links are working

Try going via the "older stuff" link on the left.

Hello,

Yeah. I've seen the Star Wars film (you could search for it on Slashdot). I'd find it and post the link here, except for that dumb URL moderation policy (no URLs are allowed in conversation forums). I'm not really sure how we're supposed to suggest good resources for articles, except by such vague directions as seen above.

Yours,
Jake

Henry - did you manage to obtain copyright permissions and clarifications off the various people who's images you've used? If so, it would be good to put a note about the copyright status of each piece.

Remember, the BBC is a "commercial" use, so be wary...