Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

[Michael Everson]

> On 4 Apr 2017, at 02:01, Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14 at telia.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Book formatting? Old style book formatting still cannot use as sophisticated layouts as HTML can... (AFAIK).
>> 
>> Yeah, but come on, the chief use of chess characters is to cite them inline in text like any other symbol @ § % & and the other equally chief use of chess characters is to set 8 × 8 chessboards which float in space in the layout as figures. The layout requirement isn’t all that demanding that HTML offers a major advantage. 
> 
> In case you missed it, the statement I made above was in *SUPPORT* of your proposal (in general, but not necessarily all details)…

It’s not easy to tell because couterapproaches suggested are not well specified and really don’t seem to be practical. 

It *is* important that there be an even number of characters in every row of 8 squares for fallback display to be better rather than worse, I think. I don’t think it’s possible to ensure that the rendering engine every app displays the fallback identically (Seems that Word and LibreOffice and Pages and Quark display a little differently; this seems to be that they load glyphs from some fonts before glyphs from others. 

I found while setting the tables that it was convenient to have to remember that every one of the 64 characters had to have VS1 or VS2 along with it. Constructing a table from scratch and modifying and existing one both felt easier with uniform encoding.

Michael Everson