Garth Wallace wrote on Wed, Aug 31, 2016 06:26 AM UTC:
Well, that's partly why I asked. The current draft is limited by my research skills. Information on the symbols used by fairy chess composers was relatively easy to come by, but I had a much harder time finding info on symbols used by variant creators, so I only included the knighted compounds since I knew they were used in several relatively popular variants, and the shatranj pieces because I had an unambiguous example of their use in notation in a published document. That doesn't mean a case can't be made for other pieces, it just means that I don't have enough data to make a case. So I'd like to involve people with more expertise on that front.
There are also open questions about several pieces. For example, should a camel piece be considered unified with the existing DROMEDARY or BACTRIAN CAMEL characters? Since some games call a vao an "archer" or "bowman", should an archer and a diagonal cannon be considered variations on the same character? These aren't questions I can answer on my own, they would depend on consensus.
But I never expected you to replace images on the website or in Game Courier with Unicode characters, particularly in board diagrams. That's not really what this is about. This is so that people can use figurine notation for chess variants in plain text contexts like email, and more conveniently in styled text contexts like Word documents.
Well, that's partly why I asked. The current draft is limited by my research skills. Information on the symbols used by fairy chess composers was relatively easy to come by, but I had a much harder time finding info on symbols used by variant creators, so I only included the knighted compounds since I knew they were used in several relatively popular variants, and the shatranj pieces because I had an unambiguous example of their use in notation in a published document. That doesn't mean a case can't be made for other pieces, it just means that I don't have enough data to make a case. So I'd like to involve people with more expertise on that front.
There are also open questions about several pieces. For example, should a camel piece be considered unified with the existing DROMEDARY or BACTRIAN CAMEL characters? Since some games call a vao an "archer" or "bowman", should an archer and a diagonal cannon be considered variations on the same character? These aren't questions I can answer on my own, they would depend on consensus.
But I never expected you to replace images on the website or in Game Courier with Unicode characters, particularly in board diagrams. That's not really what this is about. This is so that people can use figurine notation for chess variants in plain text contexts like email, and more conveniently in styled text contexts like Word documents.