Making ASCII Art with Fixed Width, Sans-Serif Fonts.
I’ve been making ASCII art since 1998. I’m a great fan of the FixedSys font. It is a monospace font which works very well for illustrating with text. The individual characters are plain and straight up and down, without many flourishes. (Plain fonts, without flourishes are called sans-serif). FixedSys is also a text which displays on the dark side. This is nice compared to some monospace fonts which give a very light, thin display.
However, Windows Vista was the first new computer I bought where I noticed the FixedSys font is missing. I looked for it, tried other font options, but was not really happy. So I went online to see what people were writing about it.
I now know that FixedSys has been given an upgrade of sorts and is now known as Consolas. I found Consolas and gave it a try. It is nice, smoother than the old FixedSys. But, I am a bit of a traditionalist, loyal to whatever I liked first.
While searching I found the font called FixedSys Excelsior. It is like the old fashioned FixedSys but it is less smooth than the new Consolas font. You can see a pretty drastic difference in the two fonts when I show them in an ASCII art illustration of the Canadian flag.
Monospaced Fonts to Try
- Basic > Fixed width fonts | dafont.com
- Anonymous(tm)
- Coding Horror: Progamming Fonts
- Inconsolata
- ProTEXT – Dark Courier Download as a TTF File
- Dark Courier True Type Font