November 13, 1998

Holiday cards can be tricky in e-mail – adorning a message with Web coding risks having it be unreadable by the recipient, and it's a bit silly to make the reader open a Web browser just to see your message. But there is "ASCII art" – using letters, numbers, dashes, slashes and other plain-text characters to etch out an image. You can create some surprisingly rich illustrations that way, as the "ASCII Art Gallery" http://www.ascii-art.com shows. Stumped by the complexity of generating art with just a keyboard? A variety of Web sites – try, for instance, http://www.surfplaza.com/figlet – will turn your name into ASCII art for you. Just type in words and select a style from more than 100 choices, then copy the art that you like.
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Rob Pegoraro rob@twp.com