why?
(c) schafft / coma

I will explain in the article, W_H_Y it happens here. Why so miserably, with no attitude, sometimes even negative. Ah yeah, I forgot to say what I'm going to speak of... I'm talking about an ascii-art on Spectrum.

The first thing which frightens away most part of beginners in ascii-art (I'm talking about new school) - the difficulty in symbols usage. Second is that hard work on smoothing gives no sufficient form. When I was looking at new-school Speccy ascii, I didn't like them myself - if the picture must be smoothed well then it looked like shabby paper which was used to try restoring an artist's work. It was caused by the PC-based origin of them. And when I saw the Speccy-made works, I found them too naivous, because mostly there were logos with only straight lines and no curves. How the hell can this be called art, if several hours of work can't give wanted result?

Right after when I obtained PC, I understood what's the point, I saw the significant difference and convenience in ascii art. That's how I started doing this, because it's very similar to drawing Speccy screens, somewhere it's easier, somewhere harder, but that didn't prevent for me.

And then the question arose - "why?" Why you can do that on PC and you can't on lovely ZX? Where's the truth? Though I saw that some people didn't care about this situation at all. I don't know, maybe they just don't love order in chaos... but that doesn't matter here.

And I understood, why. It was the font. That was the thing which prevented from representing the conceived idea. And it was only my opinion (and it still is). And then I was hit: can't one do the font like standard BIOS font on PC? Why not. I started doing it - I dealt a lot with ascii-art, so it was pretty easy pick up necessary symbols. Though it was plenty of fuss with size of some symbols, which I had to combine with a way of filling the matrix. I was viewing different ascii pictures to get better imitation. And after not really long work I did it. I can't say it's completely identical (it won't take long for professional ascii artist to find bugs), but it is maximally approached to the BIOS one.

I should tell about its advantages comparing to other fonts, or else my words will be only mere allegation:

Symbols have various size - it distinguishes them from other fonts, where they're of almost same size. And if symbols have different height, straight lines can have various angles, and horizontal lines can have smoother form.

Now almost every symbol has the standard form - it has the same grade of importance as the first point. Even if the same symbol can be used in different cases. Well, for example, symbol "4" - its slash can be used to smoothen lines at certain angle, this symbol is often displayed as "Ч" - such function is not possible there. And also "4", due to its left and right-bottom corner gives us a way to smoothen bottoms. It will be enough to see ascii, and it will be visible to you (I'm acting almost like a tutorial now). There's a lot of symbols which have various properties, but you'll understand it when you see others' works.

Symbols occupy various pixel space in matrix right now, that gives advantages for shading. And it is more standard. It also helps while smoothing vertical lines.

Naturally, I don't insist on using this font in every program, I just recommend to use it where ascii art is involved. You can easily do your works, lets say, in ModernWorD. But the talks about editors can be whole another article.

Maybe the font is not really readable, but it was supposed to; it has quite specific features.

So, I've told you everything I wanted to. I even spoke a bit about the font creation history and included the mini-tutorial. I repeat, it's only my own opinion, it must not necessary match with yours. And I must apologize to everyone for a little experiment - for using in first Gothic this font as a basic one.

// end