--- /dev/null
+<html>\r
+<header>\r
+<title>WGP: Piece Fonts</title>\r
+</header>\r
+<body>\r
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td>\r
+<h1>The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.4.0</h1>\r
+<h2>For the ultimate WinBoard experience!</h2>\r
+</td><td>\r
+<img src="mini.gif">\r
+</td></tr></table>\r
+<p>\r
+Chess fonts are fonts where each letter is a small picture, like hieroglyphs.\r
+The pictures represent Chess pieces, e.g. the A can look like a King, the B like a Queen.\r
+Often there are separate characters for white and black pieces,\r
+and often also for pieces on white and black squares.\r
+In WinBoard 4.4, it is posible to use such fonts for displaying the pieces.\r
+You would only need the pieces on light squares for this,\r
+as WinBoard will draw the background by itself.\r
+</p>\r
+<h3>Step 1: Installing the Font on your Computer</h3>\r
+<p>\r
+The first step is to download the font.\r
+The "Chess Mark" font that is provided as an example in already included in this package,\r
+and the installer puts it in the Windows fonts folder for you,\r
+so it becomes automatically available in all your Windows applications.\r
+Other fonts can be obtained from the internet.\r
+A link to the website from which ChessMark was originally obtained,\r
+is given below.\r
+It contains many freeware fonts.\r
+You can pre-view the various fonts there as well.\r
+</p><p>\r
+To install new fonts, you can use the following procedure:\r
+After clicking the download link you can ask to open the file,\r
+Windows will then automatically show you its contents.\r
+(Often this does not work, though.\r
+In that case you will have to click 'Save' in stead of 'Open',\r
+and save the downloaded .zip file somewhere.\r
+After that you get the option to click 'Open' again,\r
+and then it usually works.)\r
+The opened zip file will in general contain 4 files,\r
+two READ_ME files (one in Danish), a Word document, and the font file (.tff) itself.\r
+</p><p>\r
+Click "extract all files" on the upper left.\r
+This makes the unpack wizzard pop up, which will guide you trough the unpacking process.\r
+You can unpack the fonts download in any convenient place;\r
+you will have to move some selected parts of it to another place anyway.\r
+</p><p>\r
+After unpacking,\r
+the .tff file must be moved to the /WINDOWS/FONTS folder to become installed.\r
+Sometimes it becomes only active after restarting your computer.\r
+If the font is correctly installed, you will see some Chess-piece symbols\r
+when you click the .tff file in your system's Fonts folder.\r
+If the page you see when clicking this file is mostly blank,\r
+you probably have to restart your computer.\r
+</p>\r
+<h3>Step 2: Tell WinBoard to use the Font</h3>\r
+<p>\r
+To use a font for rendering pieces, you have to tel WinBoard two things:\r
+<br>\r
+* Which font to use\r
+<br>\r
+* Which character represents which piece\r
+<br>\r
+The latter is unfortunately not standardized; every fonts does it differently.\r
+For the first thing there is a command-line option /renderPiecesWithFont="Chess Mark"\r
+(or whatever font you have downoaded).\r
+If you want this to become the global default for your "board look",\r
+you have to append this to the winboard.ini file in the WinBoard folder (i.e. ~\WinBoard\winboard.ini),\r
+using a text editor (e.g. MS NotePad).\r
+The option is already there in the winboard.ini supplied with the Gold Pack,\r
+but it is made inactive by putting a '*' in front of the font name.\r
+So you could also look for that option in the winboard.ini file, and delete the asterisk.\r
+</p><p>\r
+If you don't want to make the font a global default,\r
+you could make a special shortcut for it,\r
+that only works if WinBoard is invoked through this shortcut.\r
+The options we discuss here should then not go into the winboard.ini file,\r
+but in a separate small .ini file like the supplied example "ChessMark.ini".\r
+</p><p>\r
+The mapping of pieces on characters is controlled by the option /fontPieceToCharTable="...",\r
+where the "..." lists the character needed to obtain PNBRQKpnbrqk, in that order.\r
+Sometimes the mapping is specified in one of the README files that come with the font.\r
+But if you don't know which to use,\r
+you can experiment by making a text in MS Word consisting of the full alphabet,\r
+and then changing the font for it to the font you just installed.\r
+(If this package installed correctly, you should already have "ChessMark" in your font menu, there.)\r
+The winboard.ini supplied with this package already sets the proper values for ChessMark,\r
+but if you would try another font it would likely start to mix up the pieces unless you change these settings.\r
+</p>\r
+<h3>Coloring the Pieces and Fine Tuning</h3>\r
+<p>\r
+The inner part of the pieces (everything inside the black outline defined by the font)\r
+is filled with a color gradient.\r
+Usually, the black pieces have almost solid font images, so there is little to fill there.\r
+If you don't want that, you can use the /allWhite=true option\r
+(also selectable from the "Options -> Board..." menu dialog).\r
+The actual colors are set by the following four options,\r
+which define a foreground and background color for both the white and black pieces.\r
+The actual color gradually changes from foreground on one side to backfground on the other,\r
+to simulate shading.\r
+If you don't want this shading, you can make foreground and background colors equal.\r
+The colors (unfortnately) have to be given as hexadecimal code for RGB intensities...).\r
+In the winboard.ini supplied with this package they are set to white and black.\r
+</p><p>\r
+Pieces rendered with fonts are automaticaly scaled with the board size. \r
+Not all fonts are equally big though, even if they are all called 12-point (or whatever).\r
+Therefore the size of the pieces can need some fine-tuning,\r
+which can be done with the option /fontPieceSize=N, where N is a number.\r
+The number is aproximately the percentage of the size that would nominally be needed\r
+to fill an entire board square.\r
+So usually we have to set it slightly below 100.\r
+The settings used in the ChessMark.ini example file are:\r
+</p>\r
+<pre>\r
+/renderPiecesWithFont="Chess Mark"\r
+/fontPieceBackColorWhite=#ffffff\r
+/fontPieceForeColorWhite=#000000\r
+/fontPieceBackColorBlack=#ffffff\r
+/fontPieceForeColorBlack=#000000\r
+/fontPieceSize=80\r
+/fontPieceToCharTable="pnbrqkomvtwl"\r
+</pre>\r
+<h3>Links</h3>\r
+<p>\r
+<a href="http://www.enpassant.dk/chess/fontedk.htm">A Download Page for Chess Fonts</a>\r
+</p>\r
+<p>\r
+<a href="texture.html">Using arbitrary bitmaps for chess board</a>\r
+</p>\r
+<p>\r
+<a href="shortcuts.html">Customizing WinBoard through shortcuts</a>\r
+</p>\r
+</body>\r
+</html>\r
projects / xboard.git / blobdiff