ANSI Art

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

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 1980s.

Specifications and references

• ANSI control sequences
• ANSI code list
• ANSI escape code (Wikipedia)
• EMCA-48: Control Functions for Coded Character Sets

Software

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

Sample files

• Sixteen Colors
  • Sixteen Colors Artpack Archive
  • Sixteen Colors Archive at GitHub

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