Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

[Garth Wallace via Unicode]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode <
unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

>
>
> 2017-04-11 15:04 GMT+02:00 Kent Karlsson via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> :
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> Some Asian chess boards include also diagonal lines or dots on top of
> their crossing (notably 9x9 boards are subdivided into nine 3x3 subgroups
> by such dots). These chess boards do not alternate white and black
> "squares" ; beside this, the cells may also be rectangular (longer
> vertically than horizontally) however such metric is not so important, as
> long as all cells have coherent sizes and can fit the pieces (which are
> flat like domino tiles, but not laid vertically on top of the table, and
> where pieces use symbols or sinograms instead of 3D head sculptures).
>

Shogi and Xiangqi diagrams are very different from Western chess diagrams,
and necessarily outside of the scope of this proposal. There is no unified
solution because the problems to be solved are different.

Shogi diagrams are uncheckered (as Shogi boards are), with grid-lines to
separate the spaces; traditionally, chess diagrams use the contrast of dark
and light squares to distinguish spaces with no grid lines. They may, but
do not have to, have dots at some intersections (these mark starting and
promotion zones). Graphical diagrams may show images of pieces (pentagonal,
with names written in kanji), but typeset diagrams use abbreviations of the
piece names as CJK ideographs or kana: e.g. the gold general is 金, and the
promoted pawn is と. Instead of "black" and "white", the pieces belonging to
the sente player are displayed upright and those belonging to the gote
player are rotated 180°. Any proposal for Shogi would have to deal with
that.

Xiangqi diagrams are even less like chess diagrams, since Xiangqi is played
on the intersections of the board grid, not the spaces. This (and the
closely related Korean game of Janggi) is the one you're thinking of with
diagonals. Pieces are represented by CJK ideographs in circles (sometimes
octagons in the case of Janggi).

The primary issue for typesetting Western chess diagrams is dark squares
with and without piece symbols. This issue is irrelevant to East Asian
chesslike games.

I've not seen any box drawing character with such dots or all the needed
> diagonals.
>

China included some extensions to the Box Drawing characters in an early
proposal for Xiangqi characters <
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10368-n3910.pdf>. AIUI that was shot down <
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10463-chinese-chess.pdf>. China seems to
have dropped the matter. Later Xiangqi proposals by Andrew West focused on
the circled ideographs and did not pursue new diagram drawing characters,
and were eventually successful.
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