ANSI art
file format
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 characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.
The popularity of ANSI art encouraged the creation of a powerful shareware package called TheDraw coded by Ian E. Davis in 1986. Not only did it considerably simplify the process of making an ANSI art screen from scratch, but it also included a variety of "fonts", large letters constructed from box and block characters, and transition animations such as dissolve and clock.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2623363. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “ANSI art” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.