Text art tools

ssurprisetalk 4 days ago 22 commentsRead Article on hlnet.notion.site

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california-og•about 11 hours ago

This is my list, thanks for sharing!

It started out as a list for ASCII and textmode art editors but grew to include all kinds of alternative design tools. I've hosted two workshops where the assigment is to create a printed zine without the use of any Adobe software. I give this list to the participants to explore. The scans of these zines and more info can be found here:

https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/hei...

I think its crazy that my University (Aalto) pays over a million euros in licencing fees to Adobe every year while the design teachers are chronically overworked and understaffed. My ultimate goal is to persuade the institution to ditch Adobe and switch to FOSS tools, and hire more staff & teachers.

codazoda•about 2 hours ago

Nice. I love zines and I’ll enjoy checking out those other links.

jan_Inkepa•about 7 hours ago

i see pablodraw up top - you know your stuff and have good taste!

dddw•about 11 hours ago

Nice! Great goal and very cool zines!

citizenpaul•about 10 hours ago

One of the.big hurdles is pantone support. At some point most places want their design to hit the real world and pantone has that market cornered. I dont just mean the technical parts pantone has expensive licensing that most FOSS doesnt and wont ever pay.

There is more than one toll troll.in that marker.

derrasterpunkt•about 6 hours ago

There is no Pantone Support in Adobe Software since 2022/2023.

bartvk•about 10 hours ago

I am guessing that pantone is a bunch of colors that are coded a certain way? Isn't there a common mechanism across design software? Like PDF is the platform agnostic way of sharing documents?

WillAdams•about 6 hours ago

It is a licensing mechanism, a list of ink formulas, and (most importantly) an entire eco-system of ink swatches and sample books --- a designer can get a customer to agree to a colour, tear off a pair of ink chips, give one to the customer and one to the printer, and the expectation is that the printed piece will _exactly_ match the chips.

There are lots of alternatives --- the Glass Container Manufacturing Institute has a set of swatches which are used for packaging which the industry has agreed on.

That said, there isn't much spot colour work left, and most of what there is, is brand-specific, or done for budgetary reasons (long runs w/ just two colours).

california-og•about 11 hours ago

Slanted magazine did an issue recently on digital tools and compiled their own list:

https://www.slanted.de/news/digital-tools/

The issue has screenshots of many of them: https://www.slanted.de/product/slanted-magazine-47-digital-t...

codazoda•about 2 hours ago

Deleted.

I somehow managed to reply to the wrong thread.

agys•about 8 hours ago

The layout of the publication is almost unbearable… Considering that it’s a magazine a bout (graphic-) design I’d say they failed miserably.

WillAdams•about 6 hours ago

Made me instantly think of Glenn Reid's nifty "TouchType.app" for the NeXT, which I still really miss --- these days I just convert to paths and use Macromedia Freehand/MX (or a proprietary tool for the CNC machine I support on the side).

gottlobflegel•about 10 hours ago

How does notion manage to make this site, which is essentially just a static table, take several seconds to show any meaningful content?

california-og•about 9 hours ago

Tell me about it... I have plans to migrate this to a static HTML at some point.

codazoda•about 2 hours ago

I’d be willing to help with that, pro bono. I like my tech minimal, so I’m a fan of small and fast html/css with a bit of JS when necessary. Today this is probably a quick project with an AI tool and a Notion MCP.

Contact info in my profile.

I’m also the creator of the minimalist framework, Neat CSS.

https://neat.joeldare.com

cardboard9926•about 8 hours ago

How about are.na?

aghilmort•about 6 hours ago

super cool roster! niche text generators come to mind, e.g., text version of regex train tracks / git traces come to mind. png/svg version https://regexper.com/#%5Cd%7B5%7D%28-%5Cd%7B4%7D%29%3F idk if any robust ascii lib exists, same for things like root cause or swimlanes etc.

have done some 1-off 1-shots of similar for AI input/output is primary frame of reference, and plenty of others have attempted same to varying success / nice to see ASCII graphics get some new life in them

scriptsmith•about 10 hours ago

I made these to create styled text art for the MOTD of my university's HPC login node:

https://github.com/ScriptSmith/tart

https://tart.sh/

LoganDark•about 10 hours ago

Hah, another tart: https://github.com/jtdaugherty/tart/

primaprashant•about 9 hours ago

I built this [1] for myself so that I can comment lgtm in PR comments with an ASCII art. Pretty silly but fun.

[1]: LGTM ASCII Art as a Service - https://lgtms.app/

ggeorgovassilis•about 9 hours ago

Wrote this for fun over a decade ago. Still around.

https://animasci.com/