ANSI Art

ANSI Art is a variant on ASCII Art which uses ANSI escape sequences in addition to ASCII characters in order to do things like changing colors. It also uses characters from the IBM PC code page which aren't part of ASCII, allowing a wider range of characters including various graphical symbols and box-drawing characters. This sort of art was popular on bulletin board systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in other communities through the early 2000s. It is still being made in small quantities today.

Disambiguation
The term "ANSI Art" sometimes refers to the file format (text with ANSI control sequences), and sometimes to the artwork itself. In the latter sense, "ANSI Art" graphics might be stored in a file format other than ANSI Art format, such as BIN or iCEDraw.

Format details
As far as we know, there is no formal specification of ANSI Art format. It has many variants and extensions, and there is usually no easy way to tell what variant you are dealing with.

In general, it consists of plain text interspersed with ANSI escape sequences. There may be SAUCE data at the end of the file. The text is usually (at least for English language artwork) encoded in CP437. The characters in the PC BIOS font at code points 1 through 31 are allowed, with some exceptions that are treated as C0 controls instead: 9 (tab), 10 (LF), 13 (CR), 26 (end of data), 27 (ESC). In the DOS world the behavior implemented in ansi.sys became the de facto standard. This includes some oddities, such as that clear screen also moves the cursor to the upper left corner (most implementations leaves the cursor in place). This is probably also the reason that code points below 32 are considered valid, since they are typed that way in DOS with ansi.sys loaded.

Older ANSI Art files sometimes begin with a "preamble" consisting of Email/Usenet headers, or other plain text metadata or comments. The preamble will be immediately erased by the ANSI codes, so it is invisible when the file is viewed in a normal way.

Specifications and references
For information about the escape codes used in ANSI Art files, see ANSI escape code. Only documents with information specific to ANSI Art are listed here.


 * piece: docs/format/ansi.txt
 * 24-bit Ansi
 * abydos information about ANSI graphics

Software

 * Ansilove: Open-source tools to convert ANSI art and similar formats to PNG images
 * ACiD View: ANSI art (and other format) viewer for Windows
 * FFmpeg
 * PabloDraw
 * Moebius
 * piece
 * TheDraw (Wikipedia)

Sample files

 * https://16colo.rs/
 * Sixteen Colors Archive at GitHub
 * TEXTFILES: The ANSI Art Collection
 * http://cd.textfiles.com/darkdomain/artpacks/
 * BBS Ninja
 * Artpacks.org
 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/ans/

Links

 * ANSI art (Wikipedia)
 * Sixteen Colors: Video about ANSI art
 * Blocktronics ACiD Trip (2013) (video of really huge ANSI art)
 * BBS: The Documentary Part 5 - Artscene (video)
 * Birthday screens using GIF -> ANSI converters