Re: Unable to view ascii art properly

Rutuparn Pawar <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi there,
> I am a new member of this group. I was looking at the
> conversations and realized that the ASCII art is not
> displaying correctly. Do I need to set a specific font
> in my web browser?

Given that you posted using Google Groups, I think what you really
need is to view the group in a newsreader rather than a web
interface. Some graphical newsreaders (or NNTP-capable email
clients) display text with a variable-width font by default so you
may then need to find the option to switch to a fixed-width font.

In the web browser, besides using a variable-width font the
whitespace also gets messed up. I was going to suggest looking
at the page source code and copying the art from there over to a
text editor set to use a fixed-width font, but I discovered that:

a) The Google Groups web pages are MASSIVE now - the page for the
   "grasping hand" thread is 539KB!
b) I'd forgotten that HTML special characters are then shown as
   character entities. So when you finally find that art text
   amongst all the HTML/JS bloat in the page source, it's full
   of &#39; instead of ' characters (though there's no actual
   reason to do so in that particular instance).

So back to "use a real newsreader". Or maybe complain to Google
that they should have an option to put the post text inside
of <pre> tags, but I'm 99.9% sure they'll ignore you.

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