ANSI Art

File Format
Name	ANSI Art
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics ANSI Art
Extension(s)	.ans, others

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.

Specifications and references

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

• piece: docs/format/ansi.txt
• 24-bit Ansi

Software

• Ansilove: Open-source PHP-based tools to convert ANSI and similar formats to PNG images
• AnsiLove/C
• ACiD View: ANSI art (and other format) viewer for Windows
• FFmpeg

Sample files

• Sixteen Colors
  • Sixteen Colors Artpack Archive
  • Sixteen Colors Archive at GitHub
• TEXTFILES: The ANSI Art Collection
• http://cd.textfiles.com/darkdomain/artpacks/
• BBS Ninja

See also

• BIN (Binary Text)
• XBIN
• iCEDraw
• ArtWorx Data Format
• SAUCE

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)
• Nyan Cat in telnet-accessible ANSI animation
• Birthday screens using GIF -> ANSI converters