turns out that we have a gui tool for drawing ascii art: gnu emacs21 "artist-mode", which is a mouse-driven package on top of picture-mode. randy and i found this via a cycle we've gone through before: somebody on iab or iesg says "wish i had a tool for...", we fail to find it, so we design it, then google for what we just designed, and discover that somebody already wrote it and we have it on our laptops.