Linus Torvalds in Ascii Art Easy Mickey Mouse Ascii

JavE - A versatile editor for creating ASCII art

Kany years dorsum, when I was in my teens, my begetter once gave me a movie of Mickey Mouse - a very popular drawing graphic symbol. What was unique about this flick was that it was created entirely using alphanumeric characters . In other words a picture created using ASCII characters. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a graphic symbol encoding based on the English alphabet. It contains around 95 printable characters and another 33 non-printing command characters. This creation of pictures using ASCII characters is known equally ASCII art.

Creating ASCII fine art was never an piece of cake chore. For one, you demand to take imagination and a knack for portraying things in an intelligent visually appealing manner. And so again, it is much tougher than creating a drawing in any of the numerous graphics suites as your sole tool for creating ASCII art would be a text editor which has its own limitations. But with a healthy dose of perseverance and some talent in drawing, it was possible to create beautiful pictures which you could view in your text editor.

                          
              ___________________
              ,'                   `.
              /  JavE is a very       \              
              |   powerful editor for   |
              |   creating ASCII Art.   |
              \                       /                          .-.
              `._______   _________,'                      ,-. //`-                       / ,'                   (            /,-\\=/   ))
              /,'                     A            /   \ -.
              \|||/ /'                   (  | | (             /,-.`.
              (o o)                      () | | ()          _ /=/ \ :
              +-oooO--(_)------------,          || | | ||        /'-'/=/  \:
              |                       \         ||.| |.||        | |//=/ _ `
              | linuxhelp.blogspot.com \      / || | | ||\         |/\=/'-'              
              |  for Tips, Tricks and   '----|  ~~  ~  ~~ |----+     \=/   |
              |  Treats in GNU/Linux         |`-.______.-'|    |     \=/
              |                             /|            |\   |     \=/
              +------------Ooo-------,     | |   2 Years! | |  |     \=/
              |__|__|           \     \ `-.______.-' /   |    \=/
              || ||             \     `-.________.-'    |   \=/
              ooO Ooo             '----------------------+  \=/
              ,----------------.                                ,'"""=/
              /                  `.                             \=/'''
              ,'                     `.                          \=/
-'                         `-.                      \=/                            _.--
              `---.                _\=/_                 _.------''
              `---.          (`---')     _.-------''
              `-.        \___/  ,-''
              `-------------'

Now though, the perseverance part of the chore of creating ASCII fine art has been elevated by a software called JavE. JavE is 1 of its kind ASCII editor which can be used to create powerful ASCII art the same way ane creates drawings using any graphics suite. The but departure is that the picture is created entirely using ASCII characters instead of pixels. And the terminate result can be saved into a text file.

JavE ASCII editor is developed using Java linguistic communication and need Dominicus'south Java runtime environs installed on ones system for information technology to work properly. Only to realize the truthful power of this editor y'all also have to separately download a collection of fonts called figlet fonts and unpack them in the fonts sub-directory of the JavE editor. The figlet fonts enable ane to write text in ASCII art format. The figlet fonts pack accompanying JavE editor contains a collection of over 195 fonts - enough to allow i's artistic juices flow.

Fig: JavE ASCII editor interface

In one case the Sun's Java Runtime has been installed and JavE editor has also been downloaded and unpacked into a directory (I had unpacked the javE editor into a directory called javEditor), 1 can open up the editor using the following command :

                $ cd javEditor/
$                  java                    -jar                    jave.jar

This editor is rather heavy in features. It has nigh of the tools one finds in any graphics suite like the tool for drawing lines, beizer curves, rectangles, circles, clone tool, fill tool and tool for inserting text. It also boasts of a clip art library which has a collection of ASCII art forms that tin can be readily inserted into ones creations.

But the one matter I like the most in this editor is the tool to convert a GIF or Jpeg prototype into ASCII text. To cheque it out, I downloaded a picture of Linus Torvalds from the net and used the tool to create an ASCII picture show of yours truly. And y'all can meet the result of the conversion below.

Fig: ASCII representation of Linus Torvalds - created using JavE

A unique aspect of this editor is that one can export his/her text art creation equally a GIF or Jpeg image which makes it convenient to showcase ones artistic talent.

Here is another interesting application of this very useful piece of software. Suppose, I have a couple of individual ASCII pictures that I take created and I want to string these pictures together to create an animation. I can easily do it from inside JavE. This ASCII editor suite has a component called film editor in which I can import all the individual ASCII pictures I have created and so export the resulting production into a multifariousness of formats including GIF animation and even compressed javascript animation fit for displaying on a webpage.

Fig: An ASCII Tetris game in progress within JavE

And after all this if yous ever become bored, then this suite even contain a couple of inbuilt ASCII games such every bit tetris (see picture above) and labyrinth. So the next time inspiration strikes you, open up the JavE editor, create your ain ASCII art and share it with others.

banksthowelf.blogspot.com

Source: http://www.aboutlinux.info/2006/05/jave-versatile-editor-for-creating.html