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.
Some 3 years ago I found for MacOS, MacOSX and Windows something called
"Email Effects" from Sig Software (