PabloDraw

From TheAlmightyGuru
Jump to: navigation, search
Viewing some ANSI art.

PabloDraw is a free cross-platform graphic viewer and editor developed by Picoe Software in C# that specializes in graphic formats which were popular on bulletin board services (BBSes) in the 1990s including ANSI / ASCII, RIP, and various others.

Personal

My mother hired me a computer tutor in my teens and he introduced me to BBSes around 1995 (pretty late into their life cycle), by which time ANSI art had become quite intricate. Even though I had access to more-impressive VGA bitmap art, I was still very impressed with how the artists were able to make such clever use of the limited ANSI set and mere 16 colors. Some of the art produced was really impressive. In my late 30s, something had piqued my interest in ANSI art, and I went looking online to see if there was a modern ANSI art editor, and I found PabloDraw. I didn't really have the interest or patience to make any attractive art, but it was fun playing around with the program for awhile and viewing some of the online samples.

Features

  • Can view over a dozen formats:
    • Text: ANSI, ASCII, ANSI/24, ADF, Avatar, BIN, CG, IDF, Tundra, CtrlA, XBIN, Animated ANSI
    • Bitmap: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG
    • Vector: RIP
  • Can edit all text and vector formats.
  • Simulates modem speeds for animation between 300-115,200 BAUD.
  • Handles MS-DOS font sizes of 8, 14, 16, and 19 rows.
  • Supports all popular MS-DOS code pages.
  • Has cooperative editing allowing people to remotely build an art piece together.
  • Support for Amiga fonts.
  • Built-in browser for the 16colo.rs Web archive.
  • Can convert between formats.
  • Export any format to PNG or BMP.
  • Automatically opens ZIP, RAR, and 7Z archives.

Links

Link-Wikipedia.png  Link-Official.png