Years ago I setup an Arial ASCII Art Gallery based on the art I decrypted from Fate Zero, which was a popular prog from the late 90’s. The ASCII art from that time period is pretty cool and I felt like it deserved a spot on the net to be preserved. However, a lot of time has passed since then, and that gallery hasn’t aged well.
For one, all the files were encoded in Windows-1251, which is what Windows used prior to moving to unicode. This encoding used a single byte for each character and had a different character mapping. Additionally, sometime between Windows XP and now, Windows changed how it rendered the Arial font, so now many of the pieces looked a little messed up (I think this change was to make it more in-line with how other OSes render Arial).
Rather than let the gallery stay by the wayside, I decided to give it a major face-lift. I wrote a script to convert the Windows-1251 encoding to UTF-8, and then spent a minute or two on each piece, fixing any obvious errors. The old gallery still rendered properly on Windows 98, so I used a VM of the site there as a reference to any edits I made.
I also decided to over haul the UX. The old gallery required over 500 clicks to see everything, so for the new gallery I decided to put everything on one page. And to ensure good performance, I used virtualization. However, virtualization kind of messes up the browser’s Ctrl+F find feature, so I decided to write a custom search feature to allow users to search through the art.
This is where things got a little hairy though. I thought maybe I could use AI to generate tags for all of the art (my plan was to use IntelliJ’s AI assistant to comb through the files), but it turns out ASCII art is the kryptonite of LLMs. They have no idea what they’re looking at and will just hallucinate a response that makes no sense. So I had to settle for a feature that looks at the filename and file contents. However, I thought the hallucinations were kind of interesting and decided to make a short video on the topic:
Anyway, if you’re interested in checking it out you can find a link to the new gallery here:
Arial ASCII Art Gallery
Excellent. I use it for code commenting of large sections of various code.
Is the previous version still available? (loved the ability to indicate what kind of code comment it was)
It is, though I’ve hidden it since I want to discourage traffic to it. You can actually still use the code comment feature – it’s in the “Filter” dropdown that’s under the text. Also, sorry about the delayed response to this comment, it got caught in my spam filter.