What is Reddit's opinion of PabloDraw?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Most artsceners use PabloDraw or Moebius.

Or for some oldschool flavour, you can use TheDraw.

Dude just download Pablo Draw or even better, Moebius and learn it. If you’re going to run a BBS you have to do it at some point. Now’s the time to get those skillz back. Also, you already have a reference image so that’s much easier.

I'd say if you're making a profit on the BBS you should get permission for and register everything. If it's just a hobby board I wouldn't sweat it too hard. I got some ANSi from a couple artists on AgoraNet (A Fidonet type network, has a nice Ansi Artist following), a couple of them said they were doing some freebie commissions.

I gave them the overall theme, got the art, changed a couple typos, made sure the artist mark was clearly visible and that was that.

I'd also recommend Pablodraw which is a great ANSI drawing program. A little practice and you might surprise yourself

Synchronet is a good starting point -- it's both a BBS and a web CMS at the same time, i.e. your BBS can also have a web interface in addition to the 16-color ANSI textmode glory. You can use the venerable old TheDraw for DOS or go with a more recent tool like PabloDraw to compose your ANSI graphics.

https://16colo.rs is the publicly released gallery.

there's a few decent sized ascii art and bbs groups on facebook. just search "ascii art worldwide".

lots of groups use irc, discord, fb messenger, and other chat apps to organize. #impure and #titandemo on irc efnet for instance.

what drawing tools are you using? pablodraw and moebius are the major two right now.

try bbs'ing again! it's fun! but not integral to the scene. bitsunrise.com, blackflag.acid.org, and alco.bbs.io are my favorite active boards. all are covered with amazing art.

anyhow i like it! keep up the good work!

I drew this using pablodraw - if you're curious you can grab it here http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

If you're curious about ansi art, check out this IG account, the owner curates ANSI art from past and present - https://www.instagram.com/sixteen_colors

If you're really eager about ansi, you can visit - https://16colo.rs/ - Here's where all the fresh ansi (and ascii) packs drop when they come out. It also acts as a huge database of all ansi ever made (that's been recovered)

PabloDraw has been the go-to app in recent years, although Andy Herbert recently released a fantastic new app called Moebius.

My animation work involves writing my own custom Javascript code for Synchronet BBS software, which is open-source and still developed today. You can see some examples with explanations here.

BBS means bulletin board system so I think that website has a specific program that makes you able to share the art you made using the program (I found this website but it's all in Japanese and I tried making an account to be able to make something but I think you need a VPN for Japan or something).

Best I could find is pablodraw which is specifically made for ASCII art

It's a dos program, so at the command line, to convert an existing file you'd run this:

ans2asc filename.ans filename.asc

where filename.ans is an existing ansi file that you've created or edited in an ansi editor, like pablodraw... and filename.asc is the new file you're creating.

ex: ans2asc main.ans main.asc

You can read more here: http://wiki.synchro.net/util:ans2asc

...and pablodraw can be found here: http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

PabloDraw works this way. Don't let the name fool you -- it's actually a viewer/editor for ANSI art, but in viewer mode, it will display most plaintext files opened from the file browser pane in the single main window. It's a Mono application (but with native GTK widgets) and should have the environment variable "MONO_IOMAP=all" set when launching in order to make sure that file extension filters aren't case sensitive.

You can also try using Geany with the file browser enabled. This will open each file in a new tab, but otherwise is fairly close to what you're looking for.

You're right about RIP 1.5 only supporting 300x200 4:3, with non-square pixels, but that can be accommodated for by scaling the screen up to 1600x1200 with a 5x6 point scaler, then downscaling (if necessary) to the appropriate vertical resolution with an interpolative algorithm or via hardware. That's what setting aspect=true and running fullscreen with DOSBox does, and if you have a 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 monitor, you can get a pixel-perfect reproduction of the original graphics.

But you probably wouldn't have to go that far: later versions of RIPTerm support SVGA modes, and I've got 2.1 using 1024x768 in DOSBox with the emulated Tseng VGA card. Since RIP is a vector format, it just renders at that resolution, and (I assume, since my 1024x768 screencaps from RIPTerm look like higher-resolution renderings of the aspect-corrected 320x200 captures of the same) adds 20% to the y-dimension when rendering to account for square pixels.

Actually, PabloDraw implements a RIP renderer -- you might be able to reimplement some of their code.

The artpacks on Sixteen Colors can also be browsed from directly within PabloDraw, which is a great program for viewing and editing ASCII/ANSI/RIP art on modern platforms.

The thing is that ANSI graphics are text. They get their name from the ANSI escape sequences used to set the background and foreground color of an individual character. When used in conjunction with the block-drawing characters available in the extended CP437 character set used on IBM PCs and compatibles, you get colorful block graphics like what you see in the screenshot.

ANSI graphics don't need to be still images, either. Animation can be accomplished by selectively updating specified regions of the screen by repositioning the cursor as additional data streams in.

If you're interested, head over to sixteencolors.net and browse some of the art packs hosted there. You can use a viewer like PabloDraw to look at the .ans files as you'd have seen them on an old-school BBS. Try opening them up in a text editor to see what the actual escape sequences that set up the formatting look like.