![ascii art characters ascii art characters](http://he-s3.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/media/uploads/8a434be.png)
Check out both features in the screencast below! Secondly, the document can be configured to only use ASCII characters or tap into the Unicode box-drawing characters when rendering the standard shapes. There are two aspects when it comes to font substitution – giving you feedback if an issue might arise and providing you with a solution.įirstly, Monodraw does not use font substitution and it will highlight missing glyphs in red. It is very important for Monodraw to be able to correctly handle issues related to the display of ASCII art and ensure that pictures you have created get rendered perfectly when viewed outside the app. Even though the fallback font might have been fixed-width as well, it would most likely have had a different advancement and thus misaligned the character grid. The culprit was immediately revealed – font substitution! It was so obvious in retrospect, the font used to display the robot did not contain glyphs for specific characters, so a different font was substituted for particular ranges of the text. It was time to go down another level and render the robot directly using Core Text and carefully inspect the resulting text layout. Consequently, I downloaded Glyphs and checked the font metrics of both Menlo and Monaco – everything looked fine. We could draw the conclusion that the font used somehow affected the character grid but it was unknown whether it was caused by the font itself or some other side effect. Sure enough, the robot appeared misaligned in all of them when rendered using Monaco but completely fine when using Menlo. Next up, I wanted to confirm whether the misalignment arose from the way browsers rendered the text, so I opened the robot in three different text editors ( TextEdit, TextMate and Sublime Text). I knew that the problem was related to the font but I did not know what the exact issue was.
![ascii art characters ascii art characters](https://miro.medium.com/max/1200/1*B_bd4RYytGcw3ipAoJEJbg.jpeg)
Ascii art characters mac os#
As we explicitly set the font to Menlo, which is included as part of Mac OS X, we never noticed any problems ourselves during testing across all browsers.
![ascii art characters ascii art characters](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t2z19VMmF5w/T5AgaZ7AeYI/AAAAAAAAAhw/91tDOhP83D8/s1600/TEXTART-MARIO.jpg)
This can be visualised as a 2D grid of character boxes, each of which can contain a single glyph.Īfter we revealed Monodraw, we received multiple reports that the robot art at the bottom of the page did not display correctly. This stems from the fact that each character's width is exactly the same (or rather, the advancement for each character is constant). Even resolution can matter: a densely packed character such as an asterisk might look darker than a sparsely packed character such as a thick letter O if there are only a few characters per row, but instead have the same effect if there are. Let's investigate the problem.ĪSCII art depends on the usage of a monospaced font because it is what allows us to perfectly align characters. A lot of choosing your palette for ASCII art is an art, because the distribution of pixels in each character matters as much as the number of them. But even if they are displayed using a fixed-width font, things can go wrong when using Unicode characters, like in the example from Wikipedia below (running on OS X 10.9 left side shows default rendering while right side shows the correct behaviour). It is crucial that such pictures are rendered using a monospaced font, otherwise they would appear misaligned. ASCII art, or more generally text-based art, uses characters to represent pictures.