environment for viewing/creating ANSI art?
Hi --
I would like to set up an environment on my Debian system that is
suitable for viewing and creating ANSI art, specifically the sort that
was popular on bulletin board systems in the 90's.
Based on what I could find on Google, these are usually intended for the
so-called "extended ASCII" 8-bit character set that was used on IBM PC's
and compatible systems running DOS. (code page 437? please correct me if
I am wrong).
The tetradraw package in the editors section appears very promising.
I've installed it, but I've run into problems with things such as
line-drawing and box characters appearing garbled.
I've tried a variety of X terminal programs (e.g., gnome-terminal,
konsole, xterm, rxvt) with a variety of font faces; some of them
presented a variety of character encoding options and I've tried many of
those as well. I've read some messages stating that tetradraw runs best
on the Linux console; I've tried using both framebuffers and the
standard console with even more disappointing results ("bright" colors
not displayed at all, and some characters omitted entirely).
The closest I've been able to come is using the "Andale Mono" font face
from the msttcorefonts package, with either gnome-terminal or konsole.
The tetraview tool will display most of the ANSI art files I can find as
expected, but running tetradraw still displays with accented letters and
empty rectangles where I would expect box-drawing characters and so forth.
I haven't seen any problem with the escape sequences for character color
or cursor positioning, so I am led to believe that this is simply a
matter of finding the right combination of locale, character encoding,
and terminal or console font.
If anyone has recommendations for configuration (or other software to
look into) I would be very grateful.
Thanks
cmr
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