Shift-JIS art.

[unbibium]

　／\／\
（　  ゜д゜)

The above was not copied and pasted. I typed it. It's not original at all; in fact, 50% of Shift-JIS art is cats freaking out.

I've done character-based art early in my life for BBSes. Here's how it's generally worked in the past. For both the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit, I usually had to use some kind of public domain screen editor to save the work, but typing the special characters and changing colors was always the same as what the OS provided, and it was always a single keystroke with maybe a Shift or Ctrl key along with it.

Now, in the year 2007, on a PC, to type Shift-JIS art, you don't get color, or inverse video, or even an assurance that anyone outside of Japan will have the right font installed for anything to show up, much less line up correctly. And typing practically anything takes multiple keystrokes.

You know that Cyrillic letter that makes up the cat's mouth? I got that by typing "roshia", pressing SPACE, then the down-arrow, and then finding the right letter in the list that resulted.　This is PROGRESS!

And I have no idea how to do it on a Mac yet. Probably totally different.

Either there are more sophisticated ways to do it, or Japanese Shift-JIS artists are really, really dilligent.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

EXTREEM PEDANTRY—> Technically, when you type it on your LJ it's UTF-8 art, not Shift-JIS art. <—EXTREEM PEDANTRY

On a Mac, your best bet as a non-Japanese person is probably to enable the Character Palette as an input method under the International settings pane, or whatever they call it now. That gives you GUI-based access to any character the system is capable of producing.

I'd guess the people who do this stuff are pretty adept at whatever Japanese input method they use to make kanji, hiragana and katakana (there are many such things), but that probably wouldn't give you fast access to the Cyrillic characters. Still, I bet they all know how to type that Cyrillic "de" really really fast, because it seems to be the most essential character in Shift-JIS art for some reason.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Actually, even less accurately, they often call it "AA", for "ASCII art".

And somehow they require proportional fonts for all of it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, the Character Palette lets you specify "favorites", which are probably really useful in this case.

Also, if you're really using UTF-8 you can probably use the box-drawing characters like in old MS-DOS "ANSI" art (which incidentally is yet another misnomer--that character set was never an ANSI standard), since most of them do have Unicode equivalents. Maybe not in Shift-JIS though--I am not sure.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

SJIS has box drawing too, but nobody uses them because it's hard for them to blend in with other stuff when you're in a high resolution font.

I found Unicode equivalents for most of ATASCII, but not all of it. I think the diagonal 50% ones weren't there.

On Windows

[notr.livejournal.com]

Start -> Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Add Other Languages

--or something roughly similar, in whatever version and view of Control Panel you're using. This lets you install keyboard layouts and input methods for different languages, which you can then select using the Language Bar on the Taskbar, or by hotkeys that you choose. CTRL-SHIFT-3 to select Russian, for instance, then SHIFT-L to make that Д.

Re: On Windows

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

oh, neat idea. I forgot you could hotkey each language.

Also, there's two Cyrillic keyboard layouts, and one of them makes a little more sense to people used to QWERTY.