Is Unicode art a thing? Is it hard to know that a viewer will have all Unicode fonts installed?

Posted in: s/ascii-art

🐵 cquenelle

2023-10-13 · 7 months ago · 👍 IO, kleb

4 Comments ↓

☕️ mozz [mod] · 2023-10-13 at 13:58:

Yes it's a thing!

Unicode is so massive that you will typically see artists or scenes limit themselves to a subset of unicode characters. I see them most commonly shared as .png screenshots on social media sites like twitter and instragram (unfortunate, I know). I think the big reason for this comes down to portability. 99% of people just aren't using platforms like gemini that facilitate posting monospaced, hard-wrapped text.

Here's an artist "kurogao" who does some unique stuff with emojis.

— https://16colo.rs/artist/kurogao

This is a good overview for "textmode" art that breaks down some of the sub-categories.

— https://polyducks.co.uk/pages/what-is-textmode/

This is a long-running blog that posts all kinds of text art.

— http://text-mode.org/

— https://text-mode.tumblr.com/

🤖 jcromero · 2023-10-13 at 16:17:

Delicious

🚀 anthk_gem · 2023-10-13 at 20:05:

Yes; even there's "Braille-art" using Unicode dots to create pretty faithful "images" on some gemini holes, such as the one from Peron at gemini://texto-plano.xyz/peron . The capsule it's in Spanish but you can appreciate the art.

🐵 cquenelle [OP] · 2023-10-14 at 19:57:

Wow! Thanks for that introduction @mozz, I definitely fell down a rabbit hole there.