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We already learned that the ASCII standard encodes 95 printable characters. But they are not equally useful. You have already learned in the previous chapter that lines are mostly drawn with | \ / ' - . _
And these characters will usually make up the bulk of your drawing. However, they are not suitable for every kind of detail. In this chapter I want to intrduce a few other characters and potential use cases.
But first: what characters am I not using. I personally like to narrow down my choices even further by only using characters that are either symettrical or have a symmetrical counterpart. This way, I can mirror drawings. Not necessarily useful for everyone but I like to keep this option open since there is so little post-processing you can do on ASCII art.
I also do not use characters that do not integrate well with the line drawing style because they immediately pop out as letters. This also removes most of the letters for me.
This reduction leaves me with:
!"# '()*+,-./
0 :;<=>
@ O
TUV XY [\]^_
` b d o
pq v x {|}~
As you can tell some of the characters are not strictly symmetrical like @. But their overall appearance in the mirrored image will not be affected much since @ usually just represents a dark spot.
I usually use : in one of two ways: creating a soft vertical countour,
_-' _-' .' .' : vs | : | '. '. '._ '._
or making a sharp corner
_..---.._ .:_________:.
You can make line intersections with X x and +:
\ / \ / | X x -+- / \ / \ |
You can use < > V Y and v to join lines:
\ / \ / \ / \ / >-< Y V v / \ | | |