The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.3.15For the ultimate WinBoard experience! |
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WinBord 4.3.15 allows the user to use arbitrary images for the board squares. This feature was first introduced in Winboard_x. The images have to be given as a bitmap, and the board squares are cut out of it. The Winboard_x home page shows some examples of this, and hosts the bitmap files needed to acheive them for download. The direct links are listed below.
The first step is to download the image. Of course you could also provide one yourself. The format must be bitmap (.bmp), but if you have an image in another format (.jpg, .gif) you can use MicroSoft Paint to convert it to .bmp; simply open the image file in Paint, and the use the "File -> Save as..."\meu to save it as bitmap. The format in which you save can be selected at the bottom of the save dialog.
You wll need two bitmaps, one for the light squares,the other for the dark. They have to be placed in the folder 'textures', which is located in the WinBoard folder of the Gold Pack (i.e. ~\WinBoard\textures).
Next step is to tell WinBoard to use the bitmaps. For this the options /liteBackTextureFile="..." and /darkBackTextureFile="..." exist. They can be put as arguments on the command line, in the winboard.ini file, or in special .ini files called from the command line.
/liteBackTextureFile="textures/wood/dave_lite.bmp" /darkBackTextureFile="textures/wood/dave_dark.bmp" /liteBackTextureMode=2 /darkBackTextureMode=2 /overrideLineGap=0
When board textures are used, the black lines between the squares that WinBoard usually draws often are disturbing the nice look. With the /overrideLineGap option yuo can set them narrower, or meake them disappear altogether. (The number gives the width in pixels.) Note that WinBoard colors these lines for highlighting from and to-squares of moves, so if you make the lines invisibly narrow, you better highlight with an Arrow. (You can enable this form of highlighting in the "Options -> General..." menu. The TextureMode options determine how squares cut out of the bitmaps are randomly rotated before being glued together to form the board.
For changing the appearence of the pieces, you will need to use a true-type font to efine the piece symbols. Such a true-type font can be scaled to any board size. How to do this is decriped on a separate page of this tutorial.
How to Customize the Piece Symbols
Wood (already included in the WinBoard Gold Pack)