so here it is, my guide to building an asciiart nfo file.
really all you need for this guide is notepad and Damn NFO Viewer
I won't include guides to using any automated builders because for one, i like to do it manually, and two, i don't think you will ever get as good of a result using an automator....it will just look like everyone elses.
below you will see the picture i took of some very common characters used in building an nfo file. you will see above them the different shadings, lines and symbols they create.
now when viewing this in Damn, you will see it far differently than in notepad, when building an nfo, it's best to cover a broad audience, try to make it so those with both Damn and only notepad can view it properly, there are more nfo viewers out there as well, but those you'll just have to find for yourself ;)
When i started building my first nfo.....it looked ugly i thought, (you didn't see it) i had things all over the place, it wasn't coming together like i had hoped, and i found the reason was that i didn't have an overall picture in my head of how i wanted it to look.
i'd recommend grabbing your favorite paint program (mspaint for me) and drawing a crude picture to build from. then once you have that general idea, just start trying to figure out how you will incorporate that into these square figures.
for any sort of 3d effect, i'd say that the shaders (first few) are a must, anything else will leave you wanting. really it's left up to your imagination, do you want it to be a whitebackground (default in Damn) or do you want to go inverted, and black in everything except what you want to "pop" out at your viewer.
attached you will find the characters i used the most when first building an nfo, these are the most used, there might be a few others, but these are the ones that "do something" when viewed in Damn, that they don't do in notepad
use "charmap" to get more symbols, but don't go into the lower latin alphabet, or you will have to save in a unicode format, and Damn doesn't like that, it will work if you want to go really fancy on your design, but then if it's not viewed in notepad....it might not work.
hope this helps some people get started
there is one character in here, that you might wonder why i included the "ÿ" symbol. well think of it this way....while Damn defaults the background to white....what if someone's viewer doesn't? use the "ÿ" to make sure it is colored that in more nfo viewers :) just like coding a website, you want to cover all bases when possible. also i included a lot of the Û characters just do you can get a feel of the orientation of some of the half sized and middle dots, it took me a while to get the hang of that, but once i viewed it like this it made things easier.
lol
You rock! 