Dave Burt wrote:

> You can see my solution at http://www.dave.burt.id.au/ruby/lcd_digits.rb
> 
> I used two functions, one to turn something like '9' into a big ASCII-art 
> digital-looking 9, and one like UNIX's paste command to stick them next to 
> each other.

Your solution is very similar to mine. We both represented the number 
faces via bit masks and decided to first render the individual digits 
and then stick them next to each other.

I'm keeping the lines of a digit as an Array and sticking them together 
with this code:

ary.transpose.map do |line|
   line.join(" ")
end.join("\n")

Maybe that would also be an option for you.