Spectrum by overwriting " after backspace and o. Overprinting (surprint) In the 1970s and early 1980s it was popular to produce a kind of text art that relied on overprinting. This could be produced either on a screen or on a printer by typing a character, backing up, and then typing another character, just as on a typewriter. This developed into sophisticated graphics in some cases, such as the PLATO system (circa 1973), where superscript and subscript allowed a wide variety of graphic effects. A common use was for emoticons, with WOBTAX and VICTORY both producing convincing smiley faces. Overprinting had previously been used on typewriters, but the low-resolution pixelation of characters on video terminals meant that overprinting here produced seamless pixel graphics, rather than visibly overstruck combinations of letters on paper. Beyond pixel graphics, this was also used for printing photographs, as the overall darkness of a particular character space dependent on how many characters, as well as the choice of character, were printed in a particular place. Thanks to the increased granularity of tone, photographs were often converted to this type of printout. Even manual typewriters or daisy wheel printers could be used. The technique has fallen from popularity since all cheap printers can easily print photographs, and a normal text file (or an e-mail message or Usenet posting) cannot represent overprinted text. However, something similar has emerged to replace it: shaded or colored ASCII art, using ANSI video terminal markup or color codes (such as those found in HTML, IRC, and many internet message boards) to add a bit more tone variation. In this way, it is possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color. See also Micrography Types and styles: Alt code, ASCII stereogram, box-drawing characters, emoticon, FILE ID.DIZ, .nfo (release info file) Pre-ASCII history: Calligram, Concrete poetry, Typewriter, Typewriter mystery game, Teleprinter, Radioteletype Related art: ANSI art, ASCII porn, ATASCII, Fax art, PETSCII, Shift JIS art, Text semigraphics Related context: Bulletin board system (BBS), Computer art scene, :Category:Artscene groups Software: AAlib, cowsay Unicode: Homoglyph, Duplicate characters in Unicode References Further reading (Polish translators: Ania Górecka [ag], Asia Mazur [as], Błażej Kozłowski [bug], Janusz [jp], Łukasz Dąbrowski [luk], Łukasz Tyrała [lt.], Łukasz Wilk [wilu], Marcin Gliński [fsc]) External links media4u.ch - ASCII Art (ASCII Art Movie. The Matrix in ASCII Art) TexArt.io ASCII Art collection Textfiles.com archive Sixteen Colors ANSI Art and