The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.4.0
-For the ultimate WinBoard experience!
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-The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.4.0-For 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 4.4, 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. -The "Chess Mark" font that is provided as an example in already included in this package, -and the installer puts it in the Windows fonts folder for you, -so it becomes automatically available in all your Windows applications. -Other fonts can be obtained from the internet. -A link to the website from which ChessMark was originally obtained, -is given below. -It contains many freeware fonts. -You can pre-view the various fonts there as well. -
-To install new fonts, you can use the following procedure: -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 file will in general 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, which will guide you trough the unpacking process. -You can unpack the fonts download in any convenient place; -you will have to move some selected parts of it to another place anyway. -
-After unpacking, -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. -If the page you see when clicking this file is mostly blank, -you probably have to restart your computer. -
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-To use a font for rendering pieces, you have to tel WinBoard two things:
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-* Which font to use
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-* Which character represents which piece
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-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 in the winboard.ini file, and delete the asterisk.
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-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 then not go into the winboard.ini file, -but in a separate small .ini file like the supplied example "ChessMark.ini". -
-The mapping of pieces on characters is controlled by the option /fontPieceToCharTable="...", -where the "..." lists the character needed to obtain PNBRQKpnbrqk, in that order. -Sometimes the mapping is specified in one of the README files that come with the font. -But if you don't know which to use, -you can experiment by making a text in MS Word consisting of the full alphabet, -and then changing the font for it to the font you just installed. -(If this package installed correctly, you should already have "ChessMark" in your font menu, there.) -The winboard.ini supplied with this package 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 change these 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 images, 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 one 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 this package they are set to white and black. -
-Pieces rendered with fonts are automaticaly scaled with the board size. -Not all fonts are equally big though, even if they are all called 12-point (or whatever). -Therefore the 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" --
-A Download Page for Chess Fonts -
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