Day Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
There's actually a package that will take a web cam video stream and "digitize" it to ASCII text. If you blur your vision a bit, you can make out the images, though at VERY coarse resolution! > I have been fooling around with a thing I call ANZI for years. some > zips might still be on file lists. 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. Send me a working diskette with it set up and I'll test it under DOSemu! Hopefully it's just a configuration issue. There are MANY options for DOSemu that are not enabled by default. > 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'. Yes and no. DOSemu does run under X, and apparently can support that sort of thing. But yes, changing system-wide settings is generally NOT given to normal users BY DEFAULT. But then, on your own system you can do whatever you want! > 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. Another part of the problem is that DOS systems (generally) only had ONE console, whereas *nix systems (generally) have MANY, be they the physical (i.e. VGA) console display and keyboard, remote terminals (i.e. telnet) or X. DOSemu DOES work with all of these, and I had a FreeDOS editor session running remotely at a very odd 130x40 display and it worked fine. Not all programs will though, so we just need to test. > I would imagine there would be a way to set > linux up with that functionality permission given to all users. Yes, even your "automatic login"! Again, if you're the only user, you can do whatever you want! But remember: One of Linux strengths is that it is generally more secure than, say, Windows. It's by restricting things by default (but allowing changes) that this is done. > 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*. Ah, the old "paper white" displays of old. :) I think a lot has to do with contrast and eyestrain too, but ergonomics is not one of my strong points. I use both dark and light backgrounds with no problems either way. > 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. Hmmm. Interesting, but this directly contradicts some references I've seen in desktop publishing books. They say that the roman alphabet is most readable with the mix of lowercase and open fonts. They cited an example where the text of a phrase was blocked out, leaving only the relative height and width of each character visible as a solid black rectangle. The point was that if you stared at it for a bit, your eyes would recognize the letters based on their RELATION to each other. Sure enough, I was able to recognize "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." > 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. Wait... now you're ADVOCATING a bigger alphabet? > 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. But the spammer is happy sending millions of messages in the hopes that 1-2% will read and respond. Making the message harder to read wouldn't stop 'em. > 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. Well, you could also strip or turn OFF active content features without devising a whole new language! > 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, You've essentially invented another font then? Each "character" in the font represents each of the 128 values available using 7 bits? So you'd have to learn to read this new font? How would that change anything fundamentally? I'm getting lost here! > 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. So you need programs that can display your new font? So are we talking GUI now? > That was not a problem with the dos BBS terminal communications > software. The ability to display your new font/language you mean? > 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. hehe, yeah I remember the nastly flashing stuff all too well! :) > 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. Yes and no. Just don't forget non-English languages! > 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. Yes. Of course, what you and I consider "text" may be weird gobbledeygook to someone from another culture! > Graphic images are notoriously emotional. I think that's why they're used! "A picture is worth ..." > 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. You can strip all that using existing tools already. You just need to be able to run the tools! - Bob 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
