Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

[Philippe Verdy]

2017-04-05 18:28 GMT+02:00 William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com
>:

> For example, where WOMAN ZWJ ROCKET produces a glyph for a LADY ASTRONAUT,
> thus a change of meaning and I think that it went to UTC as there was a
> change of meaning but I am not congruently sure of that..
>
> SQUARE ZWJ CHESSPIECE or CHESSPIECE ZWJ SQUARE produces a CHESSPIECE ON A
> SQUARE, thus a change of meaning.
>

You're right here. The absence of ZWJ clearly means separate symbols side
by side (wether they will align vertically or match their metrics is not
relevant here but we already see that this is a problem for displaying
actual boards with the "method" proposed by Micheal Everson for use in
plain text, which just looks for me as only a hack (not a serious encoding
proposal), just as if we were replacing all German sharp s letters by Greek
beta letters, only because they more or less "look the same".

You can perfectly have a board displayed beside normal text which may
contain some chess pieces, not intended to combine with the surrounding
board, even if both symbols may also appear side by side (with independant
metrics) in text paragraphs.

Given what has been encoded for other Emojis, ZWJ should be usd between
symbols that are supposed to combine visually (such as MAN+WOMAN). The
encoding should still respect the logic, just like we do in normal scripts
(independantly of the fact they may have different visual ordering/layout,
or could have similar glyphs properly disunified because of their needed
distinct semantic properties).

Note als othat these "chess pieces" are not just intended to be used only
with chesses, and various board types may be used (not only with square
cells,  for example there are rectangular ones or triangular for Shogi
pieces in Japan, the cell colors also have their own meanings, and special
boards may have their own cells changing colors to add other rules).

Note that Shogi has other pieces with distinct semantics. The pieces are
generally flat and can be tuned to the other side to show their promotion.
Traditional pieces use cursive Kanjis, but there are modernised
**variants** using linear glyph shapes, or westernized shapes with Latin
letters or geometric symbols, or even reusing the chess pieces (including
the Queen for the Gold General; or the King for the Jewel/Jade
General/Master and for its "White" Challenger), but making distinctions
between horses (horses-dragoons) and cavalry. When promoting using chess
pieces, the promotion may be shown by placing the chess piece.on top of a
draught piece or coin/token. Coins/tokens are used to promote pawns (just
stack two pieces like in draught game).
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