Well, we all seen ascii and ansi art. I saw something recently that took the Matrix ascii and morphed them with a video clip from the movie using ansi.
I have been fooling around with a thing I call ANZI for years. some zips might still be on file lists. But in the endless innovation of the gui and the multitasking, what we have seen is popups and moving ads that annoy us rather than actually contribute to the content of the message. I've been thinking about the proliferation of gui icons as well; it looks like, the way the screen is evolving, we'll end up with 3000 characters like East Asian languages. Enuf already. I can read English, and have been told many times I dont do it well enough. I dont wanna havta learn another set of symbols. I tried my latest version of ANZI with dosemu; not too swift. I dunno if that was the fault of the dosemu that came with the distro. But routinely, dos games and tools try to change the font between the 25 & 50 line screens. Linux dont want 'users' to do that, only 'sysads'. I think there might be some problem between the DOS int 10 routines cited in Ralf Brown's INTERVU database, and what Linux will let users do with their (terminal) screens. I would imagine there would be a way to set linux up with that functionality permission given to all users. Then, there's the matter of the fonts themsevles, were actually designed for white paper output. The problem is that this screen is an emitter of light, whereas paper is a reflector. The only reason that your screen has a white background is that it saves ink. which is stupid, cause your screen dont *use ink*. Neurologist Ramachandran has gotten some interesting results with brain scans, and they are beginning to understand how the brain processes images. The font you are looking at right now is made of lines, curves, open and closed loops. What is missing is solid shapes... cause again, that takes more ink to print. However, if you systematically fill the closed loops in the bitmaps of the letters, what you'd get would be a font in which your eye would not need to focus so closely to recognize the pattern. You could read faster, with less eyestrain. However, I have also begun to design a font which splits letters in two 4 pixel wide fields. We have all seen faces ^l^ made of letters; the split would more than double the variety. Likewise, it would offer a lot more flexibility in ascii/ansi art. But- it would be a royal pain for a spammer to try to hack into. He couldnt use his familiar windoz gui tools on it. Furthermore, from the standpoint of your desktop, it is all just plain old 8 bit character code *without* any embedded commands that sabotage coders could use. The other thing is that while we need 52 characters for the upper/lower case, an anzi font would prolly work well with 30 bitmaps, leaving the rest to use as graphic elements or color control codes. Because this message goes over the internet, which is a 7 bit interface, what you see is plain ascii, not the 8 bit IBM character set. The nomenclature is not standard. pull up debug, and it'll show you the 'ascii character set' of 256 chars. But I've seen spell checkers that ignore all the high bit, 128/80h and above chars. This Netscape message editor wont show me anything if I use the alt key and the keypad. That was not a problem with the dos BBS terminal communications software. HTML offers several different fonts with 64,000 colors, while the BBS screen offered only the one font with 16 different foreground colors. But by using inverse or other background colors, we had as much variety as our brains could systematically handle. HTML, adobe, and the other graphic font tools is like having 50 brands of toothpaste. Lotsa choices you mostly dont care about that slow down the process of getting what you need. Text modes limit the chioces, but they seem to be adequate if what you are trying to do is read and write text. Text is still a pretty good idea for presenting ideas. Graphic images are notoriously emotional. i think our text mode options could be improved in increase the content while we decrease the external noise of sabotage software and spam. It would be a natural for a BBS spam free network that would make survpcs a lot more useful. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
