The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.3.15For the ultimate WinBoard experience! |
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Chess fonts are fonts where each letter is a small picture, like hieroglyphs. The pictures represent Chess pieces, e.g. the A can look like a King, the B like a Queen. Often there are separate characters for white and black pieces, and often also for pieces on white and black squares. In WinBoard 4.3.15, it is posible to use such fonts for displaying the pieces. You would only need the pieces on light squares for this, as WinBoard will draw the background by itself.
The first step is to download the font. For the "Chess Mark" font that is used as an example in the WinBoard Gold Pack, the direct link is given below. Other fonts can be obtained from the same website, given below it. You can pre-view the various fonts there as well.
After clicking the download link you can ask to open the file, Windows will then automatically show you its contents. (Often this does not work, though. In that case you will have to click 'Save' in stead of 'Open', and save the downloaded .zip file somewhere. After that you get the option to click 'Open' again, and then it usually works.) The opened zip fle will contain 4 files, two READ_ME files (one in Danish), a Word document, and the font file (.tff) itself.
Click "extract all files" on the upper left. This makes the unpack wizzard pop up. Click
The .tff file must be moved to the /WINDOWS/FONTS folder to become installed. Sometimes it becomes only active after restarting your computer. If the font is correctly installed, you will see some Chess-piece symbols when you click the .tff file in your system's Fonts folder.
To use a font for rendering pieces, you have to tel WinBoard two things:
* Which font to use
* Which character represents which piece
The latter is unfortunately not standardized; every fonts does it differently.
For the first thing there is a command-line option /renderPiecesWithFont="Chess Mark"
(or whatever font you have downoaded).
If you want this to become the global default for your "board look",
you have to append this to the winboard.ini file in the WinBoard folder (i.e. ~\WinBoard\winboard.ini),
using a text editor (e.g. MS NotePad).
The option is already there in the winboard.ini supplied with the Gold Pack,
but it is made inactive by putting a '*' in front of the font name.
So you could also look for that option, and delete the asterisk.
If you don't want to make the font a global default, you could make a special shortcut for it, that only works if WinBoard is invoked through this shortcut. The options we discuss here should than not go into the winboard.ini file, but in a separate small .ini file like the supplied example "ChessMark.ini".
The mapping of piees n characters is controlled by the option /fontPieceToCharTable="...", where the "..." lists the character needed to obtain PNBRQKpnbrqk, in that order. Usually you don't now which to use, so I always experiment by making a text in MS Word consisting of the full alphabet, and then changing the font for it to "Chess Mark". The winboard.ini supplied with WinBoard Gold Pack already sets the proper values for ChessMark, but if you would try another font it would likely start to mix up the pieces unless you cange the settings.
The inner part of the pieces (everything inside the black outline defined by the font) is filled with a color gradient. Usually, the black pieces have almost solid font imags, so there is little to fill there. If you don't want that, you can use the /allWhite=true option (also selectable from the "Options -> Board..." menu dialog). The actual colors are set by the following four options, which define a foreground and background color for both the white and black pieces. The actual color gradually changes from foreground on ne side to backfground on the other, to simulate shading. If you don't want this shading, you can make foreground and background colors equal. The colors (unfortnately) have to be given as hexadecimal code for RGB intensities...). In the winboard.ini supplied with WinBoard Gold Pack they are set to white and black.
Pieces rendered with fonts are automaticaly scaled wth the board size. Not all fonts are equally big though, even if they are all called 12-point (or whatever). Therefore size of the pieces can need some fine-tuning, which can be done with the option /fontPieceSize=N, where N is a number. The number is aproximately the percentage of the size that would nominally be needed to fill an entire board square. So usually we have to set it slightly below 100. The settings used in the ChessMark.ini example file are:
/renderPiecesWithFont="Chess Mark" /fontPieceBackColorWhite=#ffffff /fontPieceForeColorWhite=#000000 /fontPieceBackColorBlack=#ffffff /fontPieceForeColorBlack=#000000 /fontPieceSize=80 /fontPieceToCharTable="pnbrqkomvtwl"
Download the "Chess Mark" font
A Download Page for Chess Fonts