a2m

Convert ansi art to mirc art.

For reference screenshot is iTerm2 with Andale Mono font ssh'd to a linux machine attached to a tmux session running irssi.

Installation

run make and copy a2m wherever you want.

Usage

run a2m -h for a list of options

Troubleshooting

IRC Client

IRCCloud doesn't work very well. It's monospaced font is Iconsolata, served up by Google Web Fonts, which doesn't draw the block characters correctly (see below). In addition it appears to ignore several lines when flooding fast. Don't use IRCCloud, it's for people who habitually make bad decisions in life. Works best with a terminal based client.

Terminal

Don't use reverse video, just make foreground white on black background, but not bright white, there should be two different whites, bright white and grayish white, 16 unique colors in all, as shown below:

Color	Regular	Bold
Black	#000000 (0, 0, 0)	#555555 (85, 85, 85)
Red	#aa0000 (170, 0, 0)	#ff5555 (255, 85, 85)
Green	#00aa00 (0, 170, 0)	#55ff55 (85, 255, 85)
Yellow	#aaaa00 (170, 85, 0)	#ffff55 (255, 255, 85)
Blue	#0000aa (0, 0, 170)	#5555ff (85, 85, 255)
Magenta	#aa00aa (170, 0, 170)	#ff55ff (255, 85, 255)
Cyan	#00aaaa (0, 170, 170 )	#55ffff (85, 255, 255)
White	#aaaaaa (170, 170, 170)	#ffffff (255, 255, 255)

Font

The font you use needs to be monospaced obviously but if its missing some of the block drawing unicode characters its going to borrow them from another font, which will probably having a different width, resulting in poor alignment and jagged edges. Andale Mono is the best I've found so far.