Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

This is awesome. You might want to add "Printed" to the front of your title, because I've seen quite a few ASCII art projects before and almost skipped over this, but the fact that it's printed is quite novel to me at least.

The "sub-character pixels" are such a clever idea! Nice work.

Wow, those are some impressive results! I've been wanting to do some ascii art on a dot-matrix printer for a little while now, and I was thinking of something similar to your "sub-pixel rendering" but had no idea how to research/implement it. I look forward to reading through your code and references more, and I really appreciate the history that you've written up here.

Overstrike makes ASCII the first multi-byte encoding of an internationalized character set (for the Latin family of scripts anyways).

I'm not kidding. The ASCII character set was actually designed to permit overstriking to yield a variety of characters such as, e.g., á. But of course, this follows from the fact that the typefaces used in typewriters were so designed. Historically that is how people wrote characters like á and ç back in the age of typewriters. This is also why Spanish rules made accents on capital letters optional: it wasn't easy to typeset those on typewriters.

The way to encode á, then, was: a BS ' (a, backspace, apostrophe).

Do I have sources for this? I've lost track of them, and I'm not going to look just now...

Thanks :)