notepad - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Historically most [textmode art] has been drawn in an ANSI art [editor] upholding default [terminal] aesthetic conventions of displaying eg. white text on a black background. But! Not all [textmode] art upholds these conventions! Some ASCII artists, especially those designing eg. [NFO] files for MP3 or movie rips around the turn of the century, possibly a new generation of elites familiar with the look of historical warez but not with the tools used to produce their regalia, would draw in the Windows "notepad" text editor -- which defaults to having black text on a white background. (As Windows became dominant among the artists, it also became dominant among the viewers, so J Random Warezdude in the 21st century would be more likely to open nfos in notepad than in an ANSI viewer.) If the artists didn't indicate explicitly how the art is intended to be viewed (and NFOs are often distributed as ASCII raw text files, which would not accommodate the [SAUCE] metadata that could be used to definitively and unambiguously settle the matter) then the home viewer has to kind of flip a coin when trying to determine how the art should be viewed -- as white text on a black background, or the inverse. There are some subtle cues, however, including that some representational art simply looks very, very wacky when viewed inversely. (Look at the whites of their eyes!) ASCII art (and this includes [block ASCII]) intended to be viewed as black characters on a white background is described as notepad ASCII, and notepad is the tag used to denote this on [Sixteen Colors].

You can find many examples at https://16colo.rs/tags/content/notepad