overstrike-images

name	overstrike-images
description	Printing ASCII-art images with a hardcopy terminal Overstrike Emoji Kanji
version	1.0.0
author	hugh
license	MIT
metadata	{"hermes":{"tags":["ascii","teletype","asr33","tty","overstrike","hardcopy","art","kanji","emoji"],"category":"tty"}}

Pre-Requisites

Check out the repo https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33 to ~/play/asr33 Check out the repo https://github.com/hughpyle/art1.js to ~/play/art1.js Check that ~/play/asr33/bin is in your PATH

Images

The images directory contains various images using overstrike printing. In the Teletype hardcopy terminal, a line ending with CR does not advance the paper, it only returns the carriage to the left. Print one or more lines with CR separation. Print with CR+LF separattion to advance to the next line.

Ready-to-print images (text files with CR and CR/LF) are in the images direectory of this skill.

Pitfall: do not reconstruct overstrike art from line-numbered or rendered text; CR-only separators can be corrupted or omitted. Print from raw prepared bytes, preserving CR characters exactly. If chat delivery drops overstrikes after a few lines, retry in smaller chunks or use the dashboard binary path.

For Hugh's /Users/hugh/play/tty-skills dashboard teletype plugin, the robust byte-accurate path is base64 binary blocks: wrap raw prepared bytes in <BINARY>...</BINARY> or <<BINARY>>...<</BINARY>>. The dashboard/backend plugin must parse the markers, base64-decode, validate allowed teletype bytes, and enqueue decoded bytes raw. Decoded binary segments must bypass wrapping, Unicode sanitizing, and LF-to-CRLF normalization so CR-only overstrikes survive. The plain terminal/chat stream does not interpret these wrappers by itself.

After changing dashboard plugin Python, for example plugins/teletype/dashboard/plugin_api.py, restart the dashboard process. /api/dashboard/plugins/rescan can refresh plugin discovery/assets but does not prove Python route code reload.

ART1

In the late 1960s, Katherine Nash, a sculptor at the University of Minnesota, and Richard H. Williams, a computer scientist, created ART 1 — a generative program designed to be used by artists, not programmers. Published in the journal Leonardo in 1970, ART 1 allowed an artist to define a small vocabulary of characters and a set of rules for their arrangement, then let the computer compose an image on the lineprinter.

Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) was a painter associated with hard-edge abstraction and geometric painting in postwar Los Angeles. In the late 1960s, he began working with computers at the University of New Mexico, using programs like ART 1 to generate compositions on a lineprinter.

You can print several recreations of ART1 works by Nash and Hammersley. Use art1 -list to list them. Do NOT print "embroid", "lovely_meeting", "quads" or "ripples": these are ANSI terminal art. ASCII overstrike works are: "spheroids", "good_line", "jelly_centers", and "tiddly_winks".

These are also available as text files in the images directory,

File	Description
spheroids.txt	Spheroids (Nash)
good_line.txt	A Good Line is Hard To Beat (Hammersley)
jelly_centers.txt	Jelly Centers (Hammersley)
tiddly_winks.txt	Tiddly Winks (Hammersley)

These are very large prints and take a long time.

Emoji

Yes, emoji, printed with ASCII-63 hardcopy text. These are nice and small and pretty. Many emoji work well.

File	Description
duck.txt	An emoji duck
fish.txt	An emoji fish
shark.txt	An emoji shark
shell.txt	An emoji shell
wave.txt	An emoji wave

You can generate any emoji using the hemoji tool. Example: hemoji wave. (This is one of my favorites).

Others

These are special and quite large (they take a long time to print).

File	Description
han_board.txt	Kanji the classical Zen "Han no Ge" (板の偈)
pjw.txt	A picture of Peter J Weinberger from Bell Labs.

These are generated using the Python scripts in the asr33 repo:

# kanji (see asciiart/kanji/README.md, asciiart/code/overstrike_compose.py)

python overstrike_compose.py --from-font 生死事大 --rows 8 --font mincho_w3

The bin/pjw script generates the Peter J Weinberger picture, from the original at http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.jpg. The Python script asciiart/code/image2.py can process any PNG image.

Large images take a long time to prepare.

Prepared pictures in the asr33 repo include:

File	Description
buzz.jpg.txt	Buzz Aldrin
dali.jpg.txt	Salvador Dalí
mario.png.txt	Super Mario
yoda2.png.txt	Yoda

See asciiart/README.md for more details.