Often, an info file contains elaborate
ANSI art. In contrast, the typical
README file does not. As an info file is a
plain text, the art can be rendered and viewed via a
text editor. For best results, one may need to select a
monospace font and enable "US Latin" or "extended ASCII". On
Windows 95, using
Microsoft Notepad the
Terminal font set to 11pt usually produced a good rendering of art. However, web browsers use an incompatible encoding scheme resulting in incorrect rendering of info files. Also, many modern text editors often use
proportional fonts whereas ASCII art is designed to be viewed in a fixed-width font. For these reasons, dedicated info file viewers were
developed to use appropriate fonts (such as Terminus Additionally, online info file viewers are available to browse public info files. Before
Windows 95 was introduced, info files sometimes included ANSI-escape sequences to encode animated ASCII art. These animations, however, required
ANSI.SYS to be loaded by the
DOS shell. If the computer wasn't already configured to load the ANSI.SYS driver, viewing ANSI art required reconfiguring and rebooting. Because of this, ANSI art was much less common, and getting ANSI art to display correctly on a Windows 95 PC often proved more difficult, leading to a decline of such art in info files. The ASCII
code page 437 character set was originally designed by IBM for the earliest DOS PCs. It was not intended to be used throughout the non-English world. More modern ASCII art tends to use the
de facto web standard
ISO-8859-1/
ISO-8859-15 or
Unicode UTF-8 characters. == Related ==