ANSI art

Computer art form using text characters Example of long-form ANSI artwork Text-mode computer art using ANSI escape sequences ANSI art is a form of text-mode computer art that became closely associated with dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes), particularly during the early 1990s. It is related to ASCII art, but commonly uses the 8-bit IBM code page 437 character set, which includes box-drawing and block elements designed for character-cell graphics in addition to letters, numbers, and other symbols. ANSI art also uses escape sequences to control display attributes such as colour and cursor position. Under MS-DOS, these sequences could be interpreted by the optional ANSI.SYS device driver. Cursor-control sequences can also be used to produce animated text-mode works, commonly known as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files containing ANSI escape sequences commonly use the .ANS filename extension. Overview ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented ch