Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

Kent Karlsson via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Tue Apr 11 08:04:55 CDT 2017


Den 2017-04-10 12:19, skrev "Michael Everson" <everson at evertype.com>:

> I believe the box drawing characters are for drawing boxes

Which is exactly what you are doing.

> and grids on 
> computer terminals, which is not the same thing as scoring a line around a set
> of 64 graphic images.

No, that is why I put in variation selectors. The glyphic variation
selected would in my judgement fall well within the "box drawing semantics"
(if you like) of these characters.

In addition, thinking ahead, it is not at all unlikely that someone
might want to divide a chess board with a horizontal mid-line, or for
that matter a vertical mid-line (e.g. for "double chess"), or even
quadrants. And then, ta-da, there are already box-drawing characters for
doing just that (even when there is a small gap between the board and the
border. (I'm not suggesting to add variation selector sequences for /those/
box drawing characters, because I don't /know/ there is a use-case for
mid-lines in chess board layout, but I'm saying there might be.)

> I don¹t want to get mixed up in using the box-drawing
> characters. The characters which I have chosen work fine and to my mind suit
> the application better.

They "work" (of course), no font renderer or font editor is "smart" enough
to "see" that you are going quite a bit (in my judgement) outside of the
acceptable glyph variability for the characters you (so far) opted for
for chess box drawing. (Other relevant, and non-glyph, properties being
the same between the box drawing and block chars.)

That the "block characters" are pure crap (which they are), does not
mean that you can co-opt them for (slightly) "variant" box drawing.

> I also don¹t want to complicate chess fonts by having to have multiple choices
> within a font for bordering. For one thing, single-rule and double-rule
> bordering is by no means the gamut of possibility.

You are not wanting "emoji" style borders, I'm sure. But some slight
"ornate" style would be fine for the "box drawing" chars (even without
variation selectors). The "single" should still be single, though,
and the "double" be double. So triple (etc.) is out.

I think single/double line border should be a decision by the "author"/
"editor", and not the font maker. Imagine accompanying text saying
"the double bordered one is <something>".

> Chess fonts do not have to be swiss-army knives.

I don't see that I have asked for that.

B.t.w., I see you don't have 1-8, a-h labels on the boards... It might be
worth mentioning that FULLWIDTH a-h should work fine as labels (them being
em-wide).

/Kent K





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