WAnsiDraw: ANSI Art Editor online
WAnsiDraw is a drawing program for ANSI art that runs right in your browser. No sign up, no installation, your pictures stay on your computer.
What is ANSI art?
ANSI art is pictures made of text characters. They use the 256 characters of the IBM PC character set (code page 437) with blocks, shades and lines, plus 16 colors. On the bulletin board systems of the 80s and 90s such pictures greeted the callers, and groups like ACiD and iCE turned them into an art form of its own.
The pictures are stored as .ans files: characters and ANSI color codes that any terminal can show. At the end there is often a SAUCE block with title, artist and size.
What the editor can do
- Draw with the keyboard like in TheDraw, with ten character sets on F1 to F10
- Paint with the mouse: half block brush with double resolution, line, rectangle, ellipse, fill
- Box frames from line characters with matching corners and junctions
- Copy, move and mirror selections, undo at least 200 steps
- Open and save .ans, .bin and .asc with SAUCE, export as PNG
- iCE colors, 9 dot mode and a preview at modem speed
- Templates for the screens of WebCarrier BBS
How to start
- Pick the half block brush on the left and a color. The left mouse button paints with the foreground color, the right one with the background color.
- For text, click on the canvas and type. F1 to F10 put blocks and lines.
- Press Ctrl+S to save the picture as .ans or .png.
All tools and keys are listed in the manual. Drawing needs a keyboard and a mouse, on a phone a viewer opens instead.
WebCarrier BBS and source code
WAnsiDraw belongs to WebCarrier BBS, bulletin board software that runs as a website. The Templates menu has simple screens for welcome, logon, logoff and new users that you can design and upload to your board.
WAnsiDraw is free software under the AGPL-3.0, and you can run the editor on your own web space. The source code is on GitHub. Made by Christoph Scheel, chrisscheel.de.