Garth Wallace wrote on Tue, Jul 5, 2016 08:36 PM UTC:
I'm currently working with the WFCC on a proposal to encode symbols used for chess variants and fairy chess problems in Unicode so that they can be used in plain text. Currently it consists of:
The 3 cardinal rotations of the orthodox piece symbols, in white and black
The 4 intermediate rotations of the knight symbol, in white and black
Neutral (half white, half black) symbols, upright and in the above rotations
The equihopper symbol and rotated equihopper symbol, in white, black, and neutral
A florette symbol (used in some places for the Rose) in white, black, and neutral
The knighted compounds (amazon, archbishop, marshall) in white and black
A joker/jester symbol in white and black
Shatranj fers and alfil/elephant symbols in white and black
The last three are probably most applicable to chess variants rather than fairy chess problems. I was hoping to be able to propose a wider set of variant pieces (I'd love to be able to justify a cannon and gryphon, for instance) but ultimately I haven't been able to find any examples of their use in running text.
The goal here is to allow these symbols to be used for things like figurine notation without having to rely on inline images or font-switching. Support for these symbols would come "for free" in any software that supports the appropriate version of Unicode (though displaying them would still require the user to have a font that contains them).
If anybody is interested, I can supply a PDF of the proposal, though it's still a draft (the exact ordering of characters is still in flux). I'd appreciate any input or feedback from the chess variants community.
(This is a followup to this old thread, posting as a new thread because the old one's title was a bit misleading)
I'm currently working with the WFCC on a proposal to encode symbols used for chess variants and fairy chess problems in Unicode so that they can be used in plain text. Currently it consists of:
The last three are probably most applicable to chess variants rather than fairy chess problems. I was hoping to be able to propose a wider set of variant pieces (I'd love to be able to justify a cannon and gryphon, for instance) but ultimately I haven't been able to find any examples of their use in running text.
The goal here is to allow these symbols to be used for things like figurine notation without having to rely on inline images or font-switching. Support for these symbols would come "for free" in any software that supports the appropriate version of Unicode (though displaying them would still require the user to have a font that contains them).
If anybody is interested, I can supply a PDF of the proposal, though it's still a draft (the exact ordering of characters is still in flux). I'd appreciate any input or feedback from the chess variants community.
(This is a followup to this old thread, posting as a new thread because the old one's title was a bit misleading)