1. You CANNOT use the post form to design AA or accurately preview what your AA will look like when posted 2. You CANNOT use regular backslashes 3. You CANNOT start a line with a half-width (regular) space 4. You CANNOT have 2 or more half-width spaces directly next to each other 5. You CAN start a line with 1 or more full-width spaces 6. You CAN have 2 or more full-width spaces directly next to each other 7. You CAN creatively alternate between full-width and half-width spaces to achieve different whitespace lengths 8. You CAN shift the characters of a line by a few pixels by adding periods at the start (or anywhere else) in a line 9. You CAN use ancient Japanese AA editor software using Locale Emulator or similar
Rules of AA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Don't just blindly switch to UTF-8 or make other changes to dismantle these "rules" - they're just facts about how the web, Shift-JIS encoded sites, and MS PGothic font works by default
Not only will such changes break all genuine 2ch-compatible AA, but the art of 2ch AA itself is to work within these rules and overcome them to make glorious images!
>>10 That's honestly a pretty good point, and it does make the originally planned transition to UTF-8 a bit harder to do. I should note that the original World2ch from 2003 used UTF-8 for its encoding, and actually had a statement (in japanese) about it too (archived here http://world2ch.net/guide/2ch.html ), although RIR6 also had an AA option, so I'm not completely sure either way on what to do currently.
>>11 You could switch to UTF-8 and use CSS to change the font back to MS PGothic (and other popular metrically-compatible substitutes), either globally or just for this board
That does mean some AA created here might not be fully Shift-JIS compatible, but with all the AA fails so far I'm not convinced world2ch has to worry about that too much ^^;
Additionally, it could be a good idea to include the submona font in the site (like 5ch does) so that those without MS PGothic or a substitute installed will still see AA as intended: https://github.com/pera/submona-web-font
Once the default font becomes MS PGothic (or you change your browser's Japanese font settings), you can use this quick guide I made:
Here's me typing 20 half-width (regular) spaces in a row →| |← ...they get merged into 1 after posting! |←Here's me starting a line with 20 half-width spaces ...they get completely removed after posting! |←Here's how you can start a line with spaces by using full-width spaces . |←You can also start a line with a period to subtly shift the contents of a line to the right |←You can also put 1 half-width space after any full-width spaces to get additional alignment control . |←And combine this with periods |←...and so on
You can use the same techniques above to chain spaces together at any point in a line→| |← And here's what a backslash looks like→\ ...basically, don't use backslashes
And just to make sure you're all viewing this with an appropriate font, the vertical lines below should be perfectly aligned | ΛΛ ...| ΛΛ .!| 〆⌒ヽ |← Are these |（ ＾▽＾）!|（ σ_σ）.|（ ‘д‘）y-~|← lines here |と つ.|（つ旦0）..|（ Ｊ ） . |← perfectly aligned?
If it looks correct and aligned, copypaste the above into the textbox below and see how it b0rks That's because the textbox is using a monospaced font, not MS PGothic! You should design AA in an AA editor or regular text editor with the font changed to MS PGothic 12pt
The solution is to use a proper font-family instead of just setting it to submona - that way the site will only use submona as a fallback whenever MS PGothic and other substitutes are unavailable