Re: About rendering ascii code in a .txt medium

> : underline, and other attributes, that works in all Email and News.  Alas,
> : there isn't, so this debate will probably continue to eternity :-/
> 
>        Can anybody say "ANSI"?   Ansi-364 has been the
> standard (or VT-100) for remote terminal, communications,

Well, first of all the standard is called ANSI X3.64.  It is not part of
VT100 as such, rather VT100 contains many of the same ANSI codes.  ANSI is
thus a subset of VT100.

As to the use of ANSI, some might argue that ANSI codes are just as
bandwidth-hogging as HTML codes.  Not to mention that not all terminals can
accept ANSI codes (mine can, fortunately).

None of the newsreaders or Email programs I've come into contact with will
display ANSI; most will display the codes as a series of caret-characters,
like " ^[[0m " for the code that switches to the user's default color
settings.


The old Commodore systems had a nice way of setting color, underline, and so
on - they used single-character control codes (such as ^E for White).  Of
course those codes mean something entirely different on other computers.

There's also the chance of an ANSI bomb, which can do simple stuff like
redefining your keyboard, or more complex stuff like executing commands to
your Shell (I've heard of this happening in the BBS world in the past).

Either way, I'm content to leave ASCII the way it is, even though colors and
such would be nice.

Of course, I don't advocate things such as varying fonts or sizes, just
attributes that affect single characters instead of entire character sets
(again, like colors, underline, flashing, and italics)

>        You can view them with the TYPE command in
> DOS if you have ANSI.SYS installed in your CONFIG.SYS
> file, or else you will need an ansi viewer, just ask.
>        If you only use windows, sorry I mentioned it. :-)

These suggestions would be useful if I used DOS or Windows.   I don't use
either of these.  I use BSDI (Unix), via a dial-upo shell account, which I
communicate with using my Commodore 128.

Perhaps sometime in the future a set of standards will be proposed, that
include these attributes, but until then, I'll be content to remain with the
mainstream and leave my ascii art as plain 7-bit B&W text.

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