Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

[Michael Everson]

On 3 Apr 2017, at 23:53, Asmus Freytag <asmusf at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> Alternatively, a system that uses no Variation selectors and only relies on Opentype ligatures might work even better.
> 
> This would require one Empty and one Filled board cell, to ligate with whatever piece is supposed to sit on top of it. The use of Empty / Filled board cell would result in the correct metrics and by encoding an empty cell that is different from a "white square", there's no need to overload the use of the latter.

That would not be more legible — quite the opposite, in fact — because it would add variable length to lines for every character in the 8 × 8 matrix in any environment where the ligation failed. That’s not chess-legible. 

Michael Everson