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by numpad0 14 days ago
Aren't those non-ASCII "rich" symbols from Japanese fonts around PC-98/Win95 domains anyway? For me with my background, it was always obvious that mixing full-width character in ASCII text never go well for various reasons. For ASCII arts, it is obvious that vertical lines never line up, and there are going to be tons of wasted spaces and different kinds of whitespaces needed to compensate for those. I wonder if specifying MS Gothic and retuning widths for it could help, at least for Windows/Linux.
1 comments

Funny you'd mention MS Gothic (fixed-width), since old school Japanese ASCII-art on image boards assume MS PGothic (proportional!) instead. Some sites even try to detect ASCII art and force font-family on that specific post.
Yup, 2ch.net/5ch.net/5ch.io uses the MS P Gothic and there were app features and fonts like Mona Font to emulate that. They were not imageboards, though.

I just thought that MS Gothic(non-P) should be kind of widely supported, have all the symbols you need, while also being a monospace, unlike most monospace fonts that only support ASCII symbols.