This is a first draft (or first 13 versions) of an ANSI art rendition of
MS Paint's transparent/opaque option selector used for the Select and
Text tools.
A somewhat silly smattering of notes:
- Emoji representation: 🛢️🔴🧊 or 🛢️🔴🟩
- More symbols considered (and some used):
⛀⛁⛃🛢️⬬
▰𝄰ᐟ⸍⸝🧊
╭╮🔴⏺◖◗
╰╯
- The red circle seems really unreliable so I don't think I can use it.
- Overlapping the red circle/sphere object is hard to represent!
- I managed to get something fairly legible in Ubuntu's terminal,
not so much in VS Code. VS Code is harder; I might've modified some
settings, I don't know, but it doesn't handle semigraphics as well,
at least not on my computer. But...
- At least if you've used MS Paint before, you can recognize the general
color/shape profile of the icons, if not parse out what the icons are
meant to represent if you'd never looked closely at them before.
- I'm not sure if v12 or v13 is better. I moved the right border to the
right a bit by making it Braille, but should the corners extend
further right then (with two dots), or mirror the left border by using
a single dot Braille character?
- Will this make the files smaller when compressed? Doubtful.
- Will this commit make the repo larger? Yes, since the old is kept.
- But keeping the files in line with current encoding will allow me
to see changes in encoding, using --recode-samples.
- I'm excluding files not saved with the app:
generated files (4x4_font_template.ans and gradient_test.ans)
which will be recreated in their original form when regenerating,
and a manually created empty file (0x0.ans), which tests the minumum
document size of 1x1.
I used:
cd samples && sed -i 's/$/\r/' *
A git diff across branches suggests that this command gives the same results:
src/textual_paint/paint.py --recode-samples
And --recode-samples is now idempotent, for the current set of sample files.
I have a bad habit of not actually using the software I create, but
whilst perhaps I should have gone to bed, this was a delight to create,
the childlike joy of picking blocks together to form an image, imagining
what I could do with different pieces, and putting silly smiley faces
in as the crew and making them all different colors.
I didn't look at any reference while drawing this, so... it doubtless
contains many inaccuracies.
But that's rather beside the point, isn't it?
Aside from just having fun with it, I observed that the Pick Color tool
is vastly more important than in a raster workflow, since it picks not
just a color, but two colors and a character! And I would really like
the Color Eraser feature. I would sometimes use the wrong blue to match
the sky and then have to Pick Color, change color, and replace the cell,
one by one, whereas the Color Eraser should take care of that.
It's a little awkward selecting colors with Ctrl click, with it
not showing the foreground color (Input doesn't seem to support it), and
with the cognitive dissonance between the background vs foreground
here vs in MS Paint. Other than that, it worked splendidly.
