Every now and then, documentation in source code requires an ASCII table. Sometimes table cells are spanning multiple rows or/and column.
TL;DR: The tools I tried did not support that, so manual labour is still needed.
Archive for the ‘ASCII’ Category
Generating ASCII-tables with spanning cells: manual labour still needed
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/28
Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Documentation Development, Encoding, Excel, Fun, HTML, Office, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Tagged: 2 | Leave a Comment »
UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Cool interesting video: [Wayback/Archive] UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube
It covers both history from the late 1800s Baudot Code (also known as ITA1) via 1930s ITA2 and 1950’s EBCDIC / FIELDATA ages through 7-bit ASCII in the 1970s and incompatible UCS-2 (now UTF-16) of the 1990s to the current day and age of UTF-8 (which actually started out on a placemat in 1992).
Though mentioning 8-bit encoding, it skips details of extended ASCII encodings like ISO/IEC 8859 and Windows-1252.
It goes to quite some length on decoding UTF-8 and showing how forgiving the UTF-8 standard is. Yes, it is a self-synchronising code thanks to the venerable Ken Thompson.
Definitely worth watching as it also covers the Zero-width joiner which is not just important for combining Emoji, as it is used by many people nowadays, but got in fact implemented to support various scripts like Arabic script or any Indic script.
Oh, the placemat story: Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in ASCII, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, Software Development, UCS-2, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Best 404 page ever? : ProgrammerHumor
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/13
While doing some ASCII art blog-post drafts cleanup, I bumped into the (now deleted) [Wayback/Archive] Best 404 page ever? : r/ProgrammerHumor which pointed to the (also now deleted).
I got there via my (not deleted!) blog post Why I like PlantUML.
So I dug up the old archived copy of that PlantUML 404-page and made gist out of it.
I soon realised this was all encoded stuff, seemingly a mix of a ROT13 variation and some other shifting around.
Luckily the original page mentioned in the Reddit post was way easier, so I put that in a gist too.
Bot are below the blog-signature. Enjoy!
Oh, and the full text of course above the signature:
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Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, CSS, Development, Encoding, Fun, HTML, HTML5, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
ASCII art generator: GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/27
Just in case I ever need ASCII art in a document again:
[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree
Via:
- [Wayback/Archive] Dbug on X: “”ASCII art” banners in the source code, Yea or Nay? “
- [Wayback/Archive] FIGlet – hosted by PLiG
FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text
--jeroen
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Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
History of ASCII Art
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/09/01
Geocities is long dead, but luckily a lot has been archived: [Wayback] Archive.is: History of ASCII Art with a very comprehensive history ranging from ancient old hand painted art to contemporary computer made illustrations.
Via: [Wayback/Archive.is] ASCII art: The roots of ASCII art
--jeroen
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How isotopp became the online handle of Kristian Köhntopp
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/09
Like me, [Archive.is] Kristian Köhntopp is a nerd.
Unlike me, Kris bumped into character encoding issues for just about all his digital life. That started about the same time as mine, but again unlike me: he was way more involved in the technical aspects of it.
First a series of Tweets:
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Posted in ASCII, C++, Development, Encoding, EPS/PostScript, Font, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Power User, Software Development, Times New Roman | Leave a Comment »
DELPHI : EEncodingError – Invalid code page on windows xp embedded – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/15
From my Windows XP days (which are long gone), but historically relevant the answer to [Wayback] DELPHI : EEncodingError – Invalid code page on windows xp embedded – Stack Overflow by [Wayback] Remy Lebeau:
The
TEncoding.ASCIIproperty uses codepage 20127, which is not installed on XP Embedded by default. You have to install it manually. TheTEncodingclass does not exist in D2006.Are you using Indy 10, by chance? It uses
TEncoding.ASCIIby default for its string encodings. This exact error has been known to occur when using Indy on XP Embedded.
–jeroen
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C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09
Note: notepad cannot correctly guess the encoding, see the “old new thing”: [Wayback] Some files come up strange in Notepad | The Old New Thing (talking about ANSI a.k.a. Windows-1252, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, UTF-7 somewith and some without BOM as Notepad does not understand all permutations)
David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it’s forced to guess.
[Wayback] C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow shows how to detect various byte order marks in C#.
–jeroen
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Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
(mostly ASCII) List of emoticons – Wikipedia
Posted by jpluimers on 2021/03/17
Most searches for “ASCII emoticons” get you Unicode ones:
- [WayBack] Unicode kaomoji smileys emoticons emoji · GitHub
- [WayBack] emoji.json/emoji.js at master · paragbhadoria/emoji.json · GitHub
Luckily most are ASCII in List of emoticons – Wikipedia.
There are also shortcodes, which do not visually represent an emoji, but usually get translated to the image or Unicode character.
A few lists on them:
- [WayBack] Emoji-list with emojis, names, shortcodes, unicode and html entities [massive list] · GitHub
- [WayBack] The complete list of all Skype smileys codes.
- [WayBack] ⏩ Emoji Shortcodes
–jeroen
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Why I like PlantUML
Posted by jpluimers on 2018/06/13
Ever since I started using computers, I’ve liked text based solutions.
It’s one of the reasons I like PlantUML, but there are more. This is from a GitLab.com request I did a while ago: [WayBack/Archive] Please enable PlantUML rendering on gitlab.com both for standalone plantuml files and inside markdown plantuml code blocks (#2041) · Issues · GitLab.com / GitLab.com Support Tracker · GitLab (Edit 20250730: that issue now shows as a HTTP 404 as well – how fitting – [Wayback/Archive] Not Found)
one of my UML gripes from the past (I’ve been a software developer for about 30 years now) was that it wasn’t text based.
After bumping into PlantUML a long time ago in 2014 I’ve become a happy user of it for a few reasons:
- the language is text based (with many benefits I don’t need to explain)
- the tool is cross platform
- the tool is still actively developed all the way back from 2009
- after rendering, the arranging of elements is much better than I expected from an automated tool
Of course every now and then there is a glitch in complex diagrams, but I’ve found that professional tools:
- don’t do much better in fully-automated arranging
- become very cumbersome to use when you to manual arrangement
My first use initially was online, then in 2016 installed it on my Mac even submitting homebrew updates for it every now and then.
Oh: I love their 404 humour at http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/beta
Edit 20250731: Full 404 text below the signature because the PlantUML beta page does not show this 404 any more and the Reddit post with the full text got deleted.
Renderings can be in all sorts of graphics and text formats, for instance SVG, PNG, ASCII and Unicode.
Example:
plantuml -tsvg PSO.network-diagram.PlantUML.txt
--jeroen
via:
- [Archive.is/WayBack] 404 – Not Found
- There are many more, it I think this is Likely the original: [Archive.is/WayBack] ACM – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
full 404-text
The requested document is no more.
No file found.
Even tried multi.
Nothing helped.
Zilch.
Bupkis.
Not a sausage.
Maybe you just don’t have the required security clearance?
No, I am sure it is my fault.
I probably deleted it on my last backup.
I’m really depressed about this.
You see, I’m just a web server…
— here I am,
Marvin, as they call me,
brain the size of the universe,
trying to serve you a simple web page,
and then it doesn’t even exist!
Where does that leave me?!
I mean, I don’t even know you.
How should I know what you wanted from me?
You honestly think I can *guess* what someone I don’t even *know* wants to find here?
*sigh*
Man, I’m so depressed I could just cry.
And then where would we be, I ask you?
It’s not pretty when a web server cries.
And where do you get off telling me what to show anyway?
Just because I’m a web server,
and possibly a manic depressive one at that?
Why does that give you the right to tell me what to do?
Huh?
I’m so depressed…
I think I’ll crawl off into the trash can and decompose.
I mean, I’m gonna be obsolete in what, two weeks anyway?
What kind of a life is that?
Two effing weeks,
and then I’ll be replaced by a .01 release,
that thinks it’s God’s gift to web servers,
just because it doesn’t have some tiddly little security hole with its HTTP POST implementation,_
or something.
I’m really sorry to burden you with all this,
I mean, it’s not your job to listen to my problems,
and I guess it is *my* job to go and fetch web pages for you.
But I couldn’t get this one.
I’m so sorry.
Believe me!
Maybe I could interest you in another page?
There are a lot out there that are pretty neat, they say,
although none of them were put on *my* server, of course.
Figures, huh?
Everything here is just mind-numbingly stupid.
That makes me depressed too, since I have to serve them,
all day and all night long.
Two weeks of information overload,
and then *pffftt*, consigned to the trash.
What kind of a life is that?
Now, please let me sulk alone.
I’m so depressed._
related
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Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Diagram, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Encoding, Fun, git, GitHub, GitLab, PlantUML, Software Development, Source Code Management, SVG, UML, Unicode, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 