ANSI escape sequence question

Posted by Arcusix on Sat 09 Jul 2016 10:50 AM — 2 posts, 14,508 views.

Arcusix Sat 09 Jul 2016 10:50 AM #0

Obviously this isn't the right sub-forum for this question. Feel free to perform voodoo curses on me, as appropriate.

I noticed the following ANSI escape sequence recently:

ESC+[1;32;40m

This equates to BOLD + GREEN + BLACK BACKGROUND. My question is, why doesn't BOLD apply to both the foreground and background colours? I don't understand the rule. Does BOLD only apply to the foreground, in all circumstances?

I noticed that MUSHclient, in common with Mudlet and even raw telnet on a Linux Box, only apply the bold to the foreground colour.

Nick Gammon Australia Forum Administrator Sun 10 Jul 2016 06:24 AM #1

Well, strictly speaking, bold shouldn't change the colour at all. For example in your word processor, if you make a word bold neither its colour, nor the background colour, changes.

I think it is a convention in MUD games at least, that the use of bold switches the foreground colour to a brighter version of the colour. To change the background as well would be very off-putting. For example, assuming a black background, "bold black" would make every bolded word appear on a grey (not black) background.