so after all this time doing ascii and ansi art i feel like i should talk about my workflow.

when i started, like everything else texted based, i used {neo,}vim. but after learning about the "proper ansi art scene" (using colors, specific fonts and character sets, ICE colors, sauce metadate, etc, etc) i decided to use the "scene's standard" text art editor pablodraw.

it works fine on linux but has some specific requirements. any version of mono will work, but you need to export TERM=xterm when you run it. it also required you use gtk-sharp-2 v2.12.42-1 OR LOWER. there's some bug in the new version that gives it a memory leak and causes it to crash. pablo relies heavily on the function keys (all F1-F12), so on my different laptops you might need to switch the media/function keys to not need to hold a dedicated FN modifier to reach them. here's the shell script i use to run pablodraw:


we talked about learning to draw and different techniques in the thread already, so i'll keep this related to workflow. pablo's manual is missing/lackluster. it explains the tools (drawing, coloring, etc) but is missing docs on some of it's more advanced features: this manual explains more (e.g. block mode versus paste mode, flipping/mirroring/inverting/rotating on the x/y axis).

once you have something done and saved (as a thing.ans) you can export it as a png. note that the zoom level you have set in the editor will be the same zoom as the exported image.

these are done in the ASCII/cp437 character set. so if you want to display them in a modern editor or shell, you'll need to convert them to UTF-8/unicode. dcat made a nice little tool to do that: https://pastebin.com/raw/Pp1W4PfG. once you make it you can just pipe your ansi out into the the shell and the color codes work just fine. (e.g. ansicat < rad_shit.ans). then you can then put them in in your .zshrc or silly shell sciots like me.