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. 

 

Andy Holden <A.B...@ncl.ac.uk> (that's me) just wrote:

> 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.
>

 It does still get mangled, if received by Pegasus, and the second 
version gets more or less restored to what it previously looked like in 
Pegasus.

 Pasting back from Pegasus to Notepad undoes the damage, but that's not 
really the point, is it?

 Andy.

In article <4ffu55$62...@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk>, Andy Holden
<A.B...@ncl.ac.uk> writes:

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

So glad you asked, as I have the same problem. Will be waiting for an
answer.

Afraid to say that there is nothing you can do.  Your problem is in your 
font.  The newest programs no longer need to use monotype fonts, so the 
spaces between your letters, and the space each letter takes up on a line 
could be anything.  Consequently, this completely screws up the ability to 
use ASCII art in email sigs.  You can set your email program to use a 
monotype font (e.g. Courier), but there's no guarantee that your recipient 
will have his program set appropriately.

To check, in a monotype font, these two lines should be the same length:

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

seeing as they both have 25 characters.  But in any other font, the line of 
w's is going to be about three times as long as the i's.

swe...@aol.com (SweetCdn) wrote:

>So glad you asked, as I have the same problem. Will be waiting for an
>answer.

 I have now received an e-mail reply about this, and it's not good news -

(Begin copy of e-mail)

Pegasus mail uses a proportional font.

eg.
iiii
mmmm

the lines above contain the same number of letters but using a 
proportional font they LOOK different sizes. When you use notepad all the 
letters are of the same size so it looks ok. There is absolutely nothing 
you can do about it. Sorry!

The way that I do it is to do it in Notepad, email to my friend, and then 
get him to cut and paste it back into notepad. Hope this helps.

Lee Clark

(end copy of e-mail)

 I assume some e-mail programs use non proportional spacing, which would 
leave ascii art unmutilated. The only advice I can add to the above is to 
find out whether this applies. 

 I can send mail in non proportional spacing using Netscape instead of 
Pegasus, but if the mail reader uses  proportional spacing it will still 
look wrong on receipt.

 Andy.