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About ASCII art and Jgs font (2023)

34 points by Luc

by thomascgalvin

2 subcomments

This site certainly makes some interesting usability choices.
When the page loads, the article takes up about 25% of the screen, on the bottom right. It's basically in the exact place I wouldn't look for the content I loaded the page for.
Metadata about the article takes up just as much space at the article itself, a full quarter of the screen, even though it's only a few lines long. Once you start scrolling, there's just a massive empty gulf off to the left.
The menu is ... I didn't realize it was a menu at first.
It's actually much more readable on mobile, which might be a first for me

by JdeBP

0 subcomment

The design of the font is quite interesting, but it's not universally applicable for text art work of course. Making ordinary punctuation and alphanumeric characters have the same connection properties as the line drawing and box characters comes at the expense of distorting text art that relies on conventional glyph shapes to make sub-cell slopes and whatnot work. There's stuff out there that relies on (say) the symmetry of opening and closing single quotes or the visual similarity of the dollar symbol and the capital letter S.