Designing ASCII graphics with JavE
Make Your Mark
© Alexey Klementiev, 123RF
The free JavE ASCII editor lets you create diagrams, brighten email messages, write circuit diagrams, create cartoons, or just design ASCII art for pleasure.
As the name Java ASCII Versatile Editor, or JavE for short, suggests, this editor uses ASCII characters [1] instead of the lines, dots, and shapes you are familiar with in drawing tools like GIMP. With characters and letters of the alphabet, JavE creates graphic shapes and lines. This style of drawing is not only practical – for example, you can add a compact route sketch to an email message – over the years it has developed into a genuine art form known as "ASCII Art" [2].
JavE is the right tool if you are looking for an intuitive approach to designing professional and artistic ASCII-style graphics. To help you do so, the editor gives you a bunch of tools and features, including freehand drawing with the mouse, shapes, and brushes. In addition, you can export your efforts into various file and document formats, including GIF and HTML. The program also handles figlet fonts [3] and converts graphic formats to ASCII images. Besides this, it supports ROT13 encoding [4] and has a steganography feature for text [5]. To top it all off, the editor includes a collection of clipart templates and even lets you produce small cartoons.
Installation
The Java program is available on the project homepage as a ZIP archive [6]. JavE requires Java Runtime Environment version 1.6 or newer. At the command line, you can type java -version to find out which version you have.
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