this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
45 points (97.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36134 readers
999 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

This site is so cool!

             />  フ
            |  _ _| 
          /` ミ_xノ 
         /     |
        /  ヽ   ノ
        │  | | |
   / ̄|   | | |
   ( ̄  ヽ__ヽ_)__)
    \二)

But how do people make these? I searched online and the best I could find were small Japanese communities still using MS Gothic (which is metrically incompatible with Arial/more-used fonts) and halfhearted JPG-to-ASCII-bitmap converters.

Further, how do people manage these? I'd imagine an emoji search, but these millionfold emoticons don't have names; and the other alternatives are "I've got a meme for that scrolls down infinite camera roll" or searching them up every time.

⠀/\_/\
(˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) thanks lol
/ >🌷<~⁠♡

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

First off, MS Gothic is a monospace font. (Meaning all characters have the same width and move the cursor by the same horizontal distance. Ok, that's a slight oversimplification. Especially when you're dealing with asian characters, there's a possibility of "double-width" characters which are twice the width of "single-width" characters and move the cursor twice as far.) In sites like Lemmy, there are usually ways to tell Lemmy to switch into "monospace" like you did with the first cat art you posted in the body of your post. And that ensures consistency in the output. With non-monospace fonts, it's more of a crapshoot. Arial's "m" might be a different width than Comic Sans', for instance. Typically, sites like Lemmy (or 4chan or Reddit or Facebook or whathaveyou) won't have ways to specify a particular font (different Lemmy clients are also free to use different fonts), so if you composed ASCII art with a non-monospace font and pasted it into a Lemmy post/comment, even if it looks right to you in Lemmy, it may not look right to other viewers of your post. And that's why monospace is popular for these things.

How to make these? I honestly don't know if there are specialized tools for that. Probably just a standard text editor. The examples you posted have some asian characters in them, so a way to input such characters. I'm on a Linux machine and have fcitx set up for Japanese text input. If you're on another OS, I'd expect the way to set up input for asian characters would be different. Alternatively, there are probably unicode character explorers/apps that can be used and don't require quite the learning curve.

As for how to manage these, no idea. I can think roughly about how I might go about writing a program that migth manage these, but I'm not sure if any exist out there currently.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

On windows, there's an ascii/unicode char lookup table system tool, which you can use to search and copy special characters. Just FYI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Same on plasma, it's called kchar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

What the hell, how have I never opened that? 😅

I've been using webpages for this, but this is so much quicker.