After some folks asking about portability of OOo to mobile devices (and even good old Amiga), I decided that we need a canvas implementation that runs everywhere (or should I even say WORA?). Naturally, that entails a few compromises in rendering speed and quality, but OOo users are already pretty well adapted to ugly rendering & UI – or are they?
At any rate, I decided that probably the most ubiquituous output device technology is the the text terminal, spanning decades of IT hardware and orders of magnitude in computing power – portability at its best! Antialiasing on these kind of devices is a bit hard, but luckily OOo is not quite up to make use of it , anyways. Thusly, our office users don’t miss out on anything, quite the contrary – as I now expect a slew of ports to all those nifty mobile phones, pocket PCs etc…
So, based on the excellent libcaca, here are some first promising asciicanvas results:
Thorsten's Weblog 
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Pretty cool! However, I cannot really judge whether the quality is good, because I have absolutely no idea what could be on the first picture.
The second one looks like an Impress with slide-sorter on the left and a single slide that contains a “blue 8” circle (is it really one color only?) and a blue, well, something on the upper left, maybe a star.
Would be nice to see the originals for comparison. Well, I know, on this device this is the original, but I suppose you know what I mean 😉
Btw., this device does have antialiasing. That’s why you get different characters at the edges. If every pixel would just be represented by the same character, the pictures would look far more “pixelish”.
Just click on the images for the ‘original’ content. And no, asciicanvas does not currently do antialiasing – but of course it applies dithering to get the most out of the 16 or so available colors 😉
April Fools joke, guys!
I love Open Office, but I’m I’m not a programmer (the most I advanced I ever got was the bouncing ball animation on the C-64). I do love to learn why though. Whats a canvas implementation and how does having one make Open Office better?
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