How do you solve the problem of spaces?

 I recently had my first go at ascii art, which was supposed to be a 
birthday cake :-

                          o   o   o   o   o
                          I   I   I   I   I
                       |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
                       |        Happy        |
                       |       Birthday      |
                       |_____________________|

 I prepared it in notepad on a 186, and it looked less squashed than 
here, but when I pasted it into e-mail it looked awful. The candles 
became too small and spaced out because of the different characters and 
the wide space between lines, but the main problem was the auto 
formatting on the e-mail, which wanted to contract each line. Even if 
I could switch that off, the recipient wouldn't  so it would still look 
wrong on receipt.

 I experimented by e-mailing it to myself, and eventually changed it to 
this :-


           o     o     o    o     o
           |      |      |      |      |
   ____|___|___|___|___|____
   |                                           |
   |               Happy                  |
   |              Birthday                 |
   |______________________|



 It doesn't look like anything much here, but when sent to myself in 
e-mail (Pegasus), it looks something like my first picture. God only 
knows what it will look like to the recipient.

 I was wondering if anyone else has similar problems - some of the 
pictures in this newsgroup occaisionally go a bit wrong, but not as wrong 
as mine did. 

 The problem is that the e-mail doesn't like leading spaces, or spaces 
between 'words' and reduces these. Even worse is that it only makes 
slight changes when pasting from notepad to e-mail, saving the worst 
damage for when the e-mail is sent (caracters such as _ and - are also 
reduced in width, and the |s can't be made to line up exactly, only 
nearly). Although I've made it look as right as I can for Pegasus, it 
will be recived on a different system, so as I say, God knows what it 
will look like.

 As I've been typing this a possible solution has occured to me - maybe I 
should have sent it from Netscape instead of Pegasus, but that still 
doesn't solve the problem of it being mangled on receipt - I'll e-mail 
this message to myself now and see what happens.

 Anyway, the main reason I'm writing here is for any suggestions -  has 
anyone else encountered (and solved) this sort of problem?

 Please feel free to use my cake, by the way, 

 Andy. 

 

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