Ascii art in books?

Mellihymnia

Hello!

I'm working on a book to publish and I had a question in regards to formatting and usage. Is open-source ascii art allowed in books? I am not looking to do it every page, only on the title page for aesthetic effect and nowhere else.

Thank you for any help or insight!

Ianir

While Moi's answer is a good one, I need to repeat Ayisdra's concern regarding screenreaders. There are more visually impaired players in Lusternia than people seem to realise, and CONFIG SCREENREADER is mainly used by internal systems and doesn't strip non-screenreader-friendly contents from books. As well, there are multiple screenreader implementations and what symbols may not be an issue for one person may cause severe problems for another (an example coming to mind is there are a few lines which are fine for one of our VIPMud users, but have caused severe problems for a user using the iOS system screenreader).

I personally will recommend against the use of ASCII art in books/helpfiles in general because of this.

Ayisdra

Mellihymnia said:

Hello!

I'm working on a book to publish and I had a question in regards to formatting and usage. Is open-source ascii art allowed in books? I am not looking to do it every page, only on the title page for aesthetic effect and nowhere else.

Thank you for any help or insight!

They are allowed, when used in small amounts. Books, for now anyways, do have a set wrap length last I knew so you won't run into issues there.

However, we do have a number of players that use screen readers. So take that as you will for any ascii art pages.

Xenthos

There's a config for screenreading that theoretically disables ASCII, but I'm not sure how (or if) you can flag ASCII put into a book to respect that config.  Is there such a thing that authors can use?

Moi

Cultural contribution is based on word count. Thus, anything you do that has an unusual impact on word count will be heavily scrutinized. This includes any ASCII art that registers as more than 200 words according to the Lusternia word counter. Glomdoring's library has a specific scroll set aside by the librarian (me) to test the word count of things for this sort of situation.

For an example of this happening, see Tsianina's "Astrology Ephemeris" (Arcane Library # 7818), which prompted a change to how library wordcount is tabulated and got several critiques (despite otherwise being a prestige-worthy and eventually prestige-winning work!) due to it inflating its word count with by fiddling with the table format to optimize how many words the game thought it contained.

On the other hand, if your ASCII art is important to the text AND is clearly being used to promote clarity rather than to inflate wordcount, the admins will eat it up. Contrast: "The Krokani" (Wyrden Scriptures # 15924) by yours truly, which was specifically praised by divine scholars for the ASCII diagram of the castle on page 7.

Please, feel free to show me the book ingame! I'll be able to tell at a glance whether the ASCII art you want to include is going to cause critiques or not, and help you to find a version that works if the provided art isn't acceptable. I will draw it myself, if I have to.