"Dumb" plots?

Is there any neat way of producing character-based "dumb" plots in R
rather than the ordinary very good-looking graphics? It would at times be
both easy and sufficient to include such crude graphs in HTML pages rather
or similar.

You could always use Splus version 3. It had a crt() and a printer() 
graphics device, which produced ascii plots. I'd paste an example here 
but doubtless the widespread use of proportional fonts would make it 
look like what we used to call 'line noise' back in the old days.

  It can do simple line and point plots, but dont expect too much:

 > printer()
 > image(matrix(runif(100),10,10))
Error in image.default(matrix(runif(100), 10, 10)): Inactive device or
         unimplemented device primitive
Dumped
Error in image
 >

  For those of you with proportional fonts, here's 10 data points with a 
fitted linear model:

      25.........................................
        .                                    *.
        .                                  ...
     20..                               ...
        .                            *.. *
        .                         ...
     15..                    * ...
  y     .                *  ...  *
        .            *   ...
     10..             ...
        .        * ...
        .       ...
      5..*   ...
        . ...
        ..   *
        ........................................
             2       4       6       8       10

                           x


  Since R is open source, if you really really want this, you could 
either write a 'crt()' graphics device for R, or if you really really 
really want it, pay someone to do it!

Baz