X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fbb9d,25fb686ac46c0d5d,start X-Google-Attributes: gidfbb9d,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-19 23:16:25 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!lios!news.gweep.ca!not-for-mail From: google@inio.org (Ian Rickard) Newsgroups: rec.arts.ascii Subject: [DIS] A little history question Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 07:16:25 +0000 (UTC) Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 26 Sender: robomod@lios.aq2.gweep.ca Approved: rec-arts-ascii-moderator@gweep.ca Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: lios.aq2.gweep.ca 1043046985 20374 127.0.0.1 (20 Jan 2003 07:16:25 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@lios.aq2.gweep.ca NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 07:16:25 +0000 (UTC) X-Original-Date: 19 Jan 2003 23:16:17 -0800 Xref: archiver1.google.com rec.arts.ascii:260 This may seem like a bit of a weird question, but here we go: Does anyone know of ASCII-Art generation software that considered sub-character source image detail and was publicly available in or before October 1996? The earliest occurrence that I was able to find with a brief search was ASCIIMac, released in 1998. It did sub-character analysis and even did it in real time. I'm reasonably sure that if someone was doing it real-time then, someone else had to have been doing it on still images long before that. As a sample of what I'm talking about, here's what the output might look like given an input of a black skewed triangle on a white background. On the left is what the output from the kind of software I'm interested would look like. On the right is the output of what the much simpler algorithms that were around as early as the 70s would generate. sub-cell detail simple brightness '#$$h, .:MM:. '#$h, .:M:. '#h, .::. '\. .:.