ansiart2utf8

Processes legacy BBS-style ANSI art (ACiDDraw, PabloDraw, etc.) to UTF-8.
Escape codes and line endings are processed for terminal friendliness.

BEFORE

AFTER

INSTALLATION

1. Install the latest Go compiler from https://golang.org/dl/
2. Install the program:

go install github.com/BourgeoisBear/ansiart2utf8/ansiart2utf8@latest

USAGE

ansiart2utf8
  Converts ANSI art to UTF-8 encoding, expands cursor forward ESC sequences
  into spaces, wraps/resets at a specified line width, sends result to STDOUT.

  Leave the [FILE] parameter empty to read from STDIN.

USAGE: ansiart2utf8 [OPTION]... [FILE]...

OPTIONS
  -bytes uint
        MAXIMUM OUTPUT BYTES PER-ROW (0 = NO LIMIT)
  -debug
        DEBUG MODE: line numbering + pipe @ \n
  -w uint
        LINE WRAP WIDTH (default 80)
  -x    ANSI TO XTERM-256 COLOR SUBSTITUTION
          (to overcome strange terminal color scheme palettes)

NOTES

To see the result, make sure that your terminal font provides glyphs for the old CP437 box drawing characters.

Here are a few fonts that will do:

• Consolas
• Courier New
• DejaVu Sans Mono
• Envy Code R
• Iosevka

Seeing Code Page 437 in Vim

:e ++enc=cp437

Resources

• PabloDraw, an ANSI drawing program for Windows
• ACiDDraw, an ANSI drawing program for DOS
• Lots of ANSI art to be seen here:
  http://blocktronics.org/artpacks/
• Ultimate guide to pimping your terminal:
  http://mewbies.com/acute_terminal_fun_table_of_contents.htm
• A very clear mapping of code page 437 characters to Unicode at Wikipedia:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437#Characters
• Helpful references on ANSI escape codes:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
  https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Control-Sequences.html

Media

• http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/
• https://www.ansilove.org/bbs.html
• http://bbs.ninja/
• http://ascii-table.com/ansi-escape-sequences.php
• http://bluesock.org/~willg/dev/ansi.html
• https://github.com/k0kubun/go-ansi