CHESSBD.TTF   A Windows Truetype font created specifically to display a Chessboard !

If you have Windows, then you are probably aware of the WingDings Truetype font that comes with it - that lets you use various symbols to enhance documents created with Wordpad or your favourite Windows word processor. You just type in a keyboard character, highlight it with the mouse and then change the font to change the appearance....

Well CHESSBD.TTF uses the same principle - it comprises all of the chess piece symbols necessary to display the state of play in a game of Chess (or Draughts).

There is a catch - what 'letter' is used for each chess symbol !

If you analyse the board, then there are only 6 different pieces on each side, rook, knight, bishop, king, queen, pawn - but all 6 can actually reside on black or white squares during the course of a game. This gives 24 positional symbols, in addition to a blank black or white square.
I have used the following rules for defining these 24 symbols.

A WHITE square is represented by character '0' and a black square by a '1'.

WHITE pieces are always in CAPITALS - black pieces are always in lowercase.

WHITE piece
on white square 		  WHITE piece
on black square 		  black piece
on white square 		  black piece
on black square
Rook/Castle R   Rook/Castle C   rook/castle r   rook/castle c
kNight N   knighT T   knight n   knight t
Bishop B   bisHop H   bishop b   bishop h
King K   kinG G   king k   king g
Queen Q   qUeen U   queen q   queen u
Pawn P   paWn W   pawn p   pawn w

My apologies to chess masters, I know that a rook is not a castle - but I have found the above mapping reasonably logical and quite usable with a little practice.

It also leaves the letter 'd' available for draughts - which is conveniently always played on the black squares.
Following the same conventions 'D' is the WHITE, while 'd' represents black.

The beauty of this system comes in being able to type the character, and see the result instantly on the screen within Windows.

Standard chessboard opening position can be shown as ...

Opening Positions

rtbukhnc
wpwpwpwp
01010101
10101010
01010101
10101010
PWPWPWPW
CNHQGBTR

    and remember TrueType fonts
can be scaled to any size ..

Please Note:   The above chessboard is a snapshot graphic rather than a truetype font representation !

You will need to   download file CHESSBD.ZIP   and Install the font on your system to get interactive scalability....

This file contains both CHESSBD.TTF and documentation file README.WRI for displaying/confirming the basic setup.

Comments welcome ... add to my   visitor comments   database,   or just mail me ...

Enjoy ..

 

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