Unable to view ascii art properly

[Rutuparn Pawar]

Hi there,
I am a new member of this group. I was looking at the conversations and realized that the ASCII art is not displaying correctly. Do I need to set a specific font in my web browser?

Thanks!

[Eli the Bearded]

Virtually all ASCII art is designed for a fixed width font with an
aspect ratio of about 2:1 (height to width). Usually it's designed
for a san serif font, but sometimes with a serifed font in mind.

Pick something that is fixed width to get in the ballpark every time.
I don't know what fixed width san serif fonts are widely installed,
I read news and view ASCII art in xterms, using a Linux terminal
font. Some sort of Courier is going to be widely installed, that's
a fixed width serifed font. The serifs add some weight to the look
of the characters, so things will often seem a little darker than
they should be.

Elijah
------
programmer's fonts are often a good choice

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Given that you posted using Google Groups, I think what you really
need is to view the group in a newsreader rather than a web
interface. Some graphical newsreaders (or NNTP-capable email
clients) display text with a variable-width font by default so you
may then need to find the option to switch to a fixed-width font.

In the web browser, besides using a variable-width font the
whitespace also gets messed up. I was going to suggest looking
at the page source code and copying the art from there over to a
text editor set to use a fixed-width font, but I discovered that:

a) The Google Groups web pages are MASSIVE now - the page for the
"grasping hand" thread is 539KB!
b) I'd forgotten that HTML special characters are then shown as
character entities. So when you finally find that art text
amongst all the HTML/JS bloat in the page source, it's full
of ' instead of ' characters (though there's no actual
reason to do so in that particular instance).

So back to "use a real newsreader". Or maybe complain to Google
that they should have an option to put the post text inside
of <pre> tags, but I'm 99.9% sure they'll ignore you.

--
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#_ < |\| |< _#

[Andy Valencia]

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:
> Virtually all ASCII art is designed for a fixed width font with an
> aspect ratio of about 2:1 (height to width). Usually it's designed
> for a san serif font, but sometimes with a serifed font in mind.

Depending on your OS, you might also look for "monospace" fonts.

Andy Valencia
Home page: https://www.vsta.org/andy/
To contact me: https://www.vsta.org/contact/andy.html

[Colin Randall]

123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789

Hi ...

while reading comp.lang.javascript a reader posted the following:-
[quote]

If you're one of the majority currently viewing the newsgroup through Google Groups,
you've probably noticed they broke layout again.

If you use a plugin for user style-sheets you can use the following to fix the layout:

html-blob {
white-space: pre;
}

I'm currently using:

<https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-css/okpjlejfhacmgjkmknjhadmkdbcldfcb>

[unquote]

please note that i haven't tried the above out (yet) but does seem consistent
with my findings/tests on this issue ... if it works out ok i may add this to
the FAQ

obasc:
__ __ ________
/\ \ /\_\ /\___ __\
/ \ \/ / / / / _/\ \_/
/ /\ \/ / /_/ / / \ \ \
/ / /\ / /__\/ / \ \_\
\/_/ \/_______/ \/_/
__
/\/ /_/ \
__ /\
__/_ \__ ____/_ \____ ____ __
/ ___\ \ \ \ ___\ \ / / ___\ \ \
\/ / \/ / \/ / \/ / \/ / /
/ /\__/_/\ / /\__/_/\ /\ /_/
\_\ \____/ /__\ \_____\ \ \__
\__/ \ / \__/
\/
(just some scribbles)

regards
--
.
._!__ __ __
/ _\/_ |_ \!_
/ / 7 / /|
\ \_ _/ / \ .
\_//__/|_\_\!_.
|

[Colin Randall]

On 27/09/2021 20:11, Colin Randall wrote:
> On 27/08/2021 14:33, Rutuparn Pawar wrote:
>> Hi there,
>> I am a new member of this group. I was looking at the conversations
>> and realized that the ASCII art is not displaying correctly. Do I need
>> to set a specific font in my web browser?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>

> Hi ...
>
> while reading comp.lang.javascript a reader posted the following:-
> [quote]
>
> If you're one of the majority currently viewing the newsgroup through
> Google Groups,
>  you've probably noticed they broke layout again.
>
> If you use a plugin for user style-sheets you can use the following to
> fix the layout:
>
> html-blob {
>   white-space: pre;
> }
>
> I'm currently using:
>
> <https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-css/okpjlejfhacmgjkmknjhadmkdbcldfcb>
>
>
> [unquote]

and another ... [guess i should read the whole thread first]

[quote]
Thanks a bunch! Google support has been wholly unhelpful about this.
Got it to work with:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/insert-style-sheet-temporarily/>

[unquote]
>
please note that i haven't tried any of the above out (yet) but does seem consistent

with my findings/tests on this issue ... if it works out ok i may add
this to the FAQ
>
> obasc:


_

/ \ /| /| | /
/ / | | | /_
/ /__|_ | / )
/__ | () _|_ /_

[Tavis Ormandy]

On 2021-09-27, Colin Randall wrote:
>
> If you use a plugin for user style-sheets you can use the following to fix the layout:
>
> html-blob {
> white-space: pre;
> }
>

That's a neat trick, it almost works for me but the newlines look really
weird. I played with it a bit, if you use uBlock Origin, this works
perfectly for me in Chrome:

groups.google.com##html-blob:style(white-space: pre!important; font-family: monospace)
groups.google.com##html-blob > br:style(display: none!important)

(Insert those lines in "My filters" in the settings)

Tavis.

--
_o) $ lynx lock.cmpxchg8b.com
/\\ _o) _o) $ finger tav...@sdf.org
_\_V _( ) _( ) @taviso

[Colin Randall]

On 28/09/2021 02:19, Tavis Ormandy wrote:
> On 2021-09-27, Colin Randall wrote:
>>
>> If you use a plugin for user style-sheets you can use the following to fix the layout:
>>
>> html-blob {
>> white-space: pre;
>> }
>>
>
> That's a neat trick, it almost works for me but the newlines look really
> weird. I played with it a bit, if you use uBlock Origin, this works
> perfectly for me in Chrome:
>
> groups.google.com##html-blob:style(white-space: pre!important; font-family: monospace)
> groups.google.com##html-blob > br:style(display: none!important)
>
> (Insert those lines in "My filters" in the settings)
>
> Tavis.
>

Hi ... thanks for that Tavis ... looks like 'just the ticket'
shall it try-out this weekend

[Scientific (she/they) ⚧]

Yeah... any monospaced font works.