Garth Wallace wrote on Tue, Sep 9, 2014 09:35 PM UTC:
Hi, I'm the person who sent that email.
I would be interested in that WinboardF font, though I'm not actually
specifically looking for fonts. What I'm trying to do is prepare to
propose that the Unicode Consortium encode symbols for heterodox chess in
Unicode, and that means finding evidence of use, particularly in a text
context.
Diagrams aren't usually considered "text" because they're
two-dimensional in nature. I can make the argument that figurine notation
is defined as using the symbols used to represent pieces in a diagram to
represent the same pieces in notation, so evidence of common use in
diagrams shows a need for use in text, though I'm not sure whether that
will fly.
It has not been difficult to find evidence of fairy chess piece symbols, by
which I mean the standard chess symbols rotated 90°, 180°, and 270°,
neutral (half black, half white) symbols, and (to a lesser extent) the
equihopper symbol. There are books and magazines using them; the 180°
turned queen even shows up in running text in the Oxford Companion to
Chess. So I think I've got a good case there. But AIUI variant authors and
players tend to prefer distinct symbols for each piece, rather than rotated
"placeholders". I've had much less success on that front.
Unicode specifically rejects "It'd be useful" as the sole argument for
including a symbol: it has to be *in regular use*. So I'm looking for
precedent For that reason, I'm mostly limiting myself to relatively
well-known and widely played variants and variants of significant
historical interest, rather than recent inventions. So far I think the
strongest case can be made for the rook-knight and bishop-knight compounds,
since they are used in several games with significant followings, and the
symbols are of fairly straightforward construction (e.g. while there are
several ways of forming a symbol that combines a knight and rook, they are
easily recognized as equivalent), and they're even used on Wikipedia. The
rook-knight symbol even appears in a U.S. patent document (for Gothic
Chess), though instead of a bishop-knight fusion that document uses a
special Archbishop symbol. The special piece symbols used in Omega Chess
are also used on Wikipedia, but since that's a commercial variant I'm not
sure whether there are any intellectual property restrictions there.
Shatranj has fairly standardized piece shapes, which are sometimes used as
symbols, but modern symbols seem to be used more often (Murray uses both
sets for shatranj pieces in apparently arbitrary fashion), so it's hard to
say whether they would be considered a semantically distinct set or just a
choice of font. Then there are historical variants like Tamerlane, Courier,
and Grant Acedrex. I'm not sure if there are any standardized symbols
there.
Xiangqi, janggi, and shogi aren't really in my scope, since they use
Chinese characters instead of symbols, and the relevant characters are
already in Unicode.
Ultima symbols would be a tough sell, I think. The fact that the symbols in
that font don't resemble the symbols for the same pieces in, say, the
Alfaerie set, suggests that there really isn't a stable symbology for
Ultima/Baroque yet.
