Subj : How to format / upload ANSI art directly into message?
To   : Hm Derdoc
From : Digital Man
Date : Mon Sep 29 2025 23:09:40

  Re: How to format / upload ANSI art directly into message?
  By: Hm Derdoc to Digital Man on Mon Sep 29 2025 04:30 pm

 >   Re: How to format / upload ANSI art directly into message?
 >   By: Digital Man to Hm Derdoc on Mon Sep 29 2025 10:48 am
 >
 >  > I'm not clear why you would need to insert line feeds. You probably
 >  > shouldn't need to ( > assume the lines would already be terminated with
 >  > line feeds). Inserting line feeds int > the middle of arbitrary ANSI
 >  > escape sequences isn't likely to produce the output you wa
 > I started inserting line feeds because when I'd upload a file that was 38
 > rows or so, it would say "5 lines" inserted, and it would render on 5 lines,
 > so it seemed like getting that count up to the right number as my ANSI might
 > give it the space it needed to render, it did wind up with more vertical
 > space, however alignment was still off horizontally.  DoANSI editors insert
 > line feeds by default though to wrap text?

It depends on the editor. TheDraw was one of the most popular DOS ANSI editors and it had an option to set the max line length when saving a file.

 > It's my understanding that
 > could also be controlled by the terminals own wrapping behavior or an escape
 > sequence telling it to go x = 1, y = y + 1... That is to say it doesn't seem
 > like the ANSI editor(s) I've used insert those, but I could be wrong I
 > guess, but if they were there I'dexpect to see 38 lines uploaded when I just
 > uploaded the untransformed output from pablo
 > draw or moebius.

If you use the raw I/O mode (Ctrl-Z) to ASCII-upload your file, there should be no line-length limit imposed.

 >  > Have you tried displaying the file locally (before uploading) but after
 >  > your script
 >
 >  I've been looking at the transformations in Moebius to see if they are
 > wonky, some come out fine, others don't look great but I still upload em in
 > my test group to see if they solved anything.  I just decided to drop one
 > into a directory I can use echicken's ansiviewer, and it looks ok there too.
 > I do sort of wonder if my ANSI is too ambitious, so I've sort of been trying
 > just to render a much more basic rectangle, was out of alignment last I
 > checked too.  I wonder if using 80 cols is too much sometimes for an ad.
 >
 >  > processes the file?
 >  > One other thing, your QWKnet tag line appears to be using an unsupported
 >  > method of Ctrl > code insertion, "\1" isn't how it's done in the
 >  > SCFG->Networks->QWK->Default Tagline. You should be able to just type a
 >  > literal Ctrl-A character/key sequence there.
 >
 > Ahh thanks, I was wondering what it looked like, I couldn't see it in my own
 > messages, I edited some raw text file to set that up so that's why I used
 > \1, wasn't sure it would work, and now it's been confirmed not to ;)

Yup. :-)

 > Maybe there's some oddities to be taken into consideration when creating BBS
 > ads, I'd certainly start over from scratch if I knew I was using wrong
 > technique before and right technique going forward.

It sounds like it's just the upload method. Use raw input mode and that should settle ya.
-- 
                                            digital man (rob)

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