It can be done--but they've made it a total PITA. (Last time they came out of beta, Google Groups broke about eleventy-thousand things.)
Just create the ASCII art in a monospaced text editor like Notepad then paste that into the posting page.
To view ASCII art: *More options*; *Show original* or cut & paste it back to Notepad.
It *was* a click away--before the new "improved" blue version. ...AND you could go BACK to proportional **easily**. No mas.
I hope there's a special place in Hell for Google Groups' manager.
It can be done--if you're willing to jump thru hoops.
If you have settings you like, PROTECT YOUR GOOGLE COOKIES. I have my cookies.txt file (Gecko-based browser) as read-only. (I have to unprotect it every 2 weeks to re-log-in to Google then re-protect it.)
Appending &fwc=1 (Fixed Width, Courier ??) to the URL puts the Body frame of Google Groups thread into monospaced mode. To get this to "take", I sometimes have to call an *individual* post (not a thread) that I have bookmarked and which contains this attribute.
formatting link
To get back to a proportional font, I quit the browser session. Now that I think of it, &fwc=0 or &fwc=2 may also work
--though I think I already found (IIRC) the cookies thing doesn't revert if they aren't protected.
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