hidden text - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

A curious feature of [ANSI art] is the ability to output characters to the screen sharing the same foreground and background colour -- appearing, to the viewer, as nothing more than a solid block of one colour, which secretly containing invisible or unreadable characters that aren't differentiated from the same-coloured background in which they are set. Typically the combo used is black-on-black, but there's no reason eg. blue-on-blue or green-on-green wouldn't work just as well. Early ANSI viewers would often include an option to strip all colour display, allowing hidden messages to surface.

A creative and enterprising artist can do a few things with this whimsical functionality. For starters, you can use it to embed your initials all over your artwork, on the off chance that you suspect someone might be ripping your art -- if so, they'll be unwittingly stealing your invisible watermark along with your outlines! More commonly, you can hide [greetz] to your homies in the body of your artwork, or disses if you are so inclined, or even self-reflexive remarks about how portions of the artwork were challenging to make or didn't work out the way you'd hoped. On a couple of occasions (eg. Cthulu's "Polar bear making a snowman in a blizzard") entire artworks have been hidden in this fashion, with viewers being initially presented with what superficially looks like a blank screen containing no detail.

(And of course it's hard to resist using hidden text to insert an invisible asterisk in any black space where a cat's tail meets up with its body.)