Keyboard art – not just for geeks
The Mona Lisa rendered in Japanese text.
Computer text art in English speaking countries is the territory of software hackers, who use it to add untraceable tags to the cracked products they distribute.
In Japan, however, it is used in e-mail advertisements and announcements from reputable companies. While text art in European languages is limited to 95 characters of the ASCII character set that all appear at the same width, the Japanese counterpart has thousands more characters in the Shift_JIS set, allowing shading and more complex designs.
Shift_JIS art played a big part in the “Densha Otoko” (“Train Man”) phenomenon of 2004, a reportedly true story in which a computer geek received dating advice and encouragement from strangers via the popular 2channel forum site. The forum thread, which included a great deal of text art, was reprinted as a book and adapted into a stage play, a TV series, a comic book, and a film, exposing text art to a much wider audience.
Text art from Train Man. Thumbs up!
Today text art can be found in mailing lists from online book sellers and baby goods retailer Akachan Honpo.
See the baby carriage in this e-mail from a baby goods seller?