Winboard Forum

From the helpfile:

"Book

Displays a list of possible moves from the chess engine’s opening book. The first column gives moves, the second column gives one possible response for each move, and the third column shows the number of lines in the book that include the move from the first column. If you select this option and nothing happens, the engine is out of its book or does not support the book command "

This is refering to Menu - Engine - Book

But how to make these three columns visible?

I have tried with several .bin books - with Options - Common Engine - Use Book + path ---- and also in Engine - Engine Settings 1 - Polyglot section

Then after f.e 1 e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 the output from Engine - Book looks like

Bb5 95.20%
Bc4 3.21%
Nc3 0.75% etc

and from Edit - Edit Book

95.2% 2782 f1b5
3.2% 94 f1c4
0.8% 22 b1c3
0.5% 16 c2c3
0.3% 8 d2d4

Is this output okey? Otherwise the book works like a charm - and this feature is of course great to have - and
something you dreamed of for WB, in the old days... Those were days without movelist and books...

The Engine -> Book command sends the WB 'book' command to the engine (which could be Polyglot), and then simply prints what the engine sends it. It could send a poem if it wanted; WinBoard would not care, and display it in a popup. So if the format of the book info (extracted from the book you specified with the Polyglot BookFile option in Engine #N Settings) does not exactly follow the specs in the wb docs, it is Polyglot's fault.

The Edit Book menu item refers to WinBoard's own GUI book, set in the Common Engine Options dialog. On the to-do list there is display the moves in SAN (I thought I already did this, but apparently not), and make them right-clickable to cause them to be played.

Thanks for the clarification. I have taken a closer look at a rather big (415MB) .bin book and found that
there was need for a bit of tuning. It's possible to make this in Scid vs PC since that program has a book tuning
feature. A rather slow process - but some hours work makes a whole lot of difference

This also is what the Edit Book feature in WinBoard is intended for: tune the book, or add / delete moves to it. You can even edit the learning fields (which are usually 0 in Polyglot books, but are displayed in the Edit Book window as {halfpoints/counts} behind the weight + move when they are not. Because you can add moves, you can even make a book from scratch. (The WinBoard distribution contains a file empty_book.bin you could use as starting point.)

Of course Sid is pretty useless to me, as it wouldn't handle Crazyhouse, Xiangqi, Shogi, Gothic Chess... So I needed WinBoard to have this capability by itself.