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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