TAAG now has full support for TheDraw font files, color and all.
A little over 12 years ago, someone sent me a zip of old ANSI art fonts. I converted a handful of them to FIGlet fonts (basically the ones that didn’t use color), and added them into TAAG. I have always wanted to revisit the format though, as there were so many fonts created for it, and earlier this year I decided to go back and properly add support for it.
TheDraw?
TheDraw was a 1980s DOS app for creating ANSI art. You can think of ANSI art as ASCII art’s more handsome sibling: an extended 256-character set instead of ASCII’s 128, along with 16 colors. Though nowadays ASCII art is made with unicode and text can be colored however you want, so these benefits are moot. But back in the days these benefits distinguished it from ASCII art. Artists made ANSI art fonts in the 80’s in the same way they would later make ASCII art fonts for FIGlet in the 90’s and on into today.
TheDraw’s font format had the advantage of color and more characters, but it was less sophisticated, and it lacked features such as kerning. It also had hard limits in certain areas. For example, fonts couldn’t be larger than 12 characters high. I would argue FIGlet’s format is better, but I do really like the color and art style of TheDraw’s fonts.
The TAAG update
I silently made the first update for this several months ago, adding the new fonts to the drop-down list but not to the Test All page. Then in May I added them to the Test All page. I haven’t heard a peep from people who use the app, but hopefully these new fonts provide some enjoyment.
I know it seems really late for me to do a write-up on this, and I’d meant to post a blog or make a video sooner, but life has been crazy (though then again, when is life not crazy?). Additionally, videos kind of need a story, and I couldn’t figure out how to frame this one.
Also updated
The AOL macro fonts in TAAG are fixed. You can now see them again in their full ’90s glory. That’s a longer story for another day though.
Also, the Arial ASCII Art Gallery has gotten some major updates and will be getting more in the near future, but again, a story for another time.
Hey, good on you for being the flagbearer of modern ascii art fonts!
It’s awesome, I have been using TAAG for many many years, thank you!!!
You’re welcome 🙂
Was super stoked to see this update! Brings back so many memories from the old scene. Been using your generator for years to create simple little logos/splash screens for my random cli tools.
You plan on updating some of your public repos, like the cli tool to include the new ones?
Cheers
I was waiting to see if there was interest, and if so, go from there. Even though these aren’t figlet fonts, I’ve been debating updating the figlet TS library I have so that it could display them. Maybe an API like:
figlet.loadTDF(“whatever.tdf”, “font name”) // setting the font
figlet.parseTDF(“whatever.tdf”) // gives metadata about the file, including what fonts are included
I’d need to think more about this though because if I release an API I’d have to continue to support it, so I’d want to get it right. I’d need to do the same for the command line.
The other option would be to just release a standalone library for tdf files, but the idea of maintaining 2 libraries seems like a pain.
Another issue is copyright. US copyright says you can’t copyright a typeface design and the output of using a font isn’t really copyrightable, but the actual file for a font can be copyrighted. This would come into play when distributing a library. Since I don’t really know the copyright status of the tdf files, including the tdf files with the library would not be a good idea. Instead I’d probably just host them somewhere or link to RoySAC’s collection.Â
Anyway, if you’re interested in this I can put it on my list of things to look into.Â
Have to be honest and say that right after i commented this, i had a look at the JS that was bundled with the site here, and while i myself do not have the patience to scan through minified code, an LLM has no problem with it. And it also seemed to pretty much include everything needed and the reference to all the tdf files.
My intention was purely to make sure that i had a local copy of this no matter what happened with your source, and i will not publish this anywhere of course. Not trying to step on your feet.
So you dont have to spend any extra time for my sake, tho i am sure that there are many that would love to have this locally so if you were to release some cli for it that people could run locally it would be very appreciated.
Cheers
No worries, I don’t mind people doing things like that for personal use.
The additions are great!!!
Thanks :)!
Thanks for being a lover of Ascii Art and all things old! I actually grew up way past that era, and have been playing young archivist for years now…
Anyways – professional engineer, all my favorite projects get a title generated on your generator in the source code. Really loving the recent updates with ascii color code fonts from theDraw – need to figure out how to get these mapped to colored emojis so they work in the UTF 8 era…..
np, love that the generator helps you with your source headers :)!