Talk:ASCII Art (AA)
What are the exceptions to characters having either half or full width in Shift JIS art? I only know of the colon as seen in some of these Higurashi examples G1ade (talk) 20:36, 21 May 2022 (EDT)
I may be conflating MS Gothic and MS PGothic here. G1ade (talk) 20:44, 21 May 2022 (EDT)
- >I may be conflating MS Gothic and MS PGothic here
- Yup. With proportional Japanese fonts (such as MS PGothic, which is used in 2channel-style AA), the spacing of each and every character is proportional to the character's width, and these sizes can vary from font to font (Meiryo is very different to MS PGothic for example). With monospaced Japanese fonts (such as MS Gothic, which is used in Ayashii-style AA), the character spacing can only be one of two possible sizes: full-width, or half-width
- It's worth noting that in monospaced Japanese fonts, Hiragana, kanji, symbols, and characters from other non-Latin scripts are always full-width; on the other hand, Katakana, alphanumeric, and Western punctuation characters can be either full-width or half-width
- It's also worth noting that monospaced Western fonts are fixed-width, so there's only a single size available. For this reason, they're incompatible with both 2ch and Ayashii AA --Anonwaha (talk) 21:27, 21 May 2022 (EDT)
Regarding ASCII Art vs Shift-JIS Art
Technically speaking, ASCII Art is art made using ASCII characters. Japanese text art does not use ASCII, and therefore shouldn't be called ASCII Art. HOWEVER! ...the Japanese almost exclusively call their text art "ASCII Art" and "AA" (https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/アスキーアート), while "SJIS art"/"Shift-JIS art" are made-up terms that some Westerner somewhere coined - and it's not even correct because the Japanese (and everyone else) has been using UTF-8 for years
So with the above in mind, plus the fact that we are a bunch of weeaboos that obsess over Japanese things (and not least Japanese BBS culture), I think its appropriate - nay, necessary! - for us to use "ASCII Art" and "AA" to describe Japanese text art. We can just call Western text art "shitty AA" or something instead ヽ(´ー｀)ノ --Anonwaha (talk) 21:50, 21 May 2022 (EDT)
- But Heyuri is my wiki! And it's not just my opinion - it's been written all over the site for years, and its a core part of the culture. Lurk moar n00b!
- Putting the NO U crap aside, it's a fact that both Japan and Heyuri generally call it "AA". If you search through Strange World's logs alone, you'll find 97 instances of "AA", 10 instances of "ASCII art", 3 instances of "Shift JIS"/"Shift-JIS", and a great big 0 of "SJIS" - so it's silly to call it anything other than "AA" or "ASCII Art" on Heyuri's own freaking wiki -_-
- Those who want the generic Western view that Japanese AA = "SJIS Art" can just go and read the English Wikipedia article about it - just as they can read about how loli = "little anime girls", and "anything vaguely reminiscent of 2ch" = "textboard". I personally don't think there's any point just regurgitating that kind of surface-level (mis)info here, especially when we could be adding something to the English-speaking web that's not found elsewhere - namely, an English-language description of Japanese BBS culture that's more accurate and closer to how things really are/were --Anonwaha (talk) 22:55, 21 May 2022 (EDT)
- >But Heyuri is my wiki!
Excuse me, I already wrote a page about making your life miserable G1ade (talk) 00:18, 22 May 2022 (EDT)
