Cannot Change Board/Square Colors

[gatoruss]

This is probably a really basic question, and I am sorry to trouble anyone.

I downloaded and installed Winboard 4.5.2a. I opened it as a chess viewer and have tried to change the color of my squares under the appropriate drop down menu (I think it is called board options - I am not on the PC where I installed Winboard and cannot confirm). Nevertheless, the dialogue allows me to select a colors thru a color selector and shows the now color on the option window, but when I click "OK," the board colors do not change.

On a related issue, I had a previous version of Winboard that I downloaded many years ago from Tim Mann's site. The chess pieces are different that the ones that are loading with 4.5.2a (which, I believe are "Chess Mark"). Is there a way to change/select alternative pieces thru an option menu, or is downloading alternative and installing alternative fonts (as suggested near the bottom of this page) the only way to change the chess fonts?

I hope that I am posting this on the right subforum and I apologize if there is a thread on this forum or some link that that addresses my question, I searched, but could not find anything.

[H.G.Muller]

You are probably trying to change the square colors away from a situation where a background texture is used (like wood). WinBoard has two mechanisms to determine how the board squares look: through a bitmap file, or evenly colored. Only in the latter case you can select the actual color used through the dialog you mention. But when bitmaps are specified, it uses the given bitmaps (and there is no way to alter the colors compared to what the bitmap specifies).

So if you want evenly colored squares, you first have to switch the bitmaps off. Unfortunately this cannot be done from the menus yet. You would have to start WinBoard through the Startup dialog, and then specify as "Additional Options":

/liteBackTextureFile=* /darkBackTextureFile=*

("*" is recognized by WinBoard as an invalid filename, so it won't use bitmap textures, and falls back toevenly colored squares, which you can then control with the dialog.) Of course you could specify another bitmap (.bmp) file in stead of * as well.

I guess the very least that is needed is an option in the Board dialog to switch the use of textures on or off. Best would of course be to allow specification of the bitmap filenames as well, with a browse button. But this is still on the to-do list.

As to the pieces: normally WinBoard should come configured to use its internal bitmaps, and the ChessMark pieces are only used when you select "Fancy-looks WinBoard" from the menu. Pressing "Save Settings Now" in that case might make the ChessMark your standard piece font, however, andperhaps this has happened to you. To get out of this situation, you again will have to use the "Additional Options" of the Startup dialog, this time:

/renderPiecesWithFont=*

This disables the use of a font, and makes WinBoard fall back on the built-in piece symbols. Of course you cn specify any other Chess font you have installed as well. Also in this case it would be neater to have a separate option to switch the font-based renderingon or of (and provide a checkbox for it in the piece menu), rather than using the kludge of a * in the font name. I will work on this for the next version.

[gatoruss]

Thanks. That makes sense and is very helpful.

With respect to the chess peices, I think that I know what happened. When I first opened Winboard I did in fact select "Fancy-looks WinBoard." And then started to mess around with the board color settings - saving the setting, thinking that that would make the changes take effect (no being aware of the bitmap setting you mentioned).

BTW - What is the purpose/function of the "Fancy-looks WinBoard"? Is it just a theme?

Thanks, again. I appreciate your help.

[H.G.Muller]

Yes, it was just a theme, added as an example to show off the possibilities of board textures and font-based piece rendering when these features were new. I will probably remove it from 4.6 releases. (In fact the WinBoard-4.5TM already does not have it anymore.)

Anyway, the beta version now at http://WinBoard-TM.zip has checkboxes "Use Board Texture" and "Use Piece Font"in the View -> Board dialog, where you can easily switch these features on or off even during a session. New (presistent) command-line options /useBitmaps and /usePieceFont will store these in the settings file. So in the future I will probably configure WinBoard with valid texture files (wood) and pieceFont (ChessMark), but desactivate the latter by setting /usePieceFont=false.

I am still investigating the possibility to use the View->Fonts dialog to select the piece font as well as text fonts.

[gatoruss]

Thank you.

Like I said in my initial post, I had a prior version of Winboard that I downloaded several years ago. I had customized that version so that it had many different options selected by menu. I have always found such beauty in Winboard's customizability.

Unfortunately for me, other things in life (like an unexpected addition to the family after a 13-year hiatus) have kept me away from chess for a time and my prior version of Winboard - and the PC on which it was installed - fell into disuse. I am back chasing this "chess thing" again, and trying to catch up with all the changes to Winboard - and other things!

All the things that have been done with Winboard - including this forum and the help available - are very cool. I had never really focused on the interplay between Winboard and chess engines, and the role it has seemingly playing in development of chess engines. Reading thru some Forum posts while searching for an answer to my question, almost makes me want to learn about programming chess engines

Alas, I have wondered off-topic...have a good day. Thanks, Again.

[H.G.Muller]

OK, I have found a satisfactory solution for changing the piece font through the menu:

The View->Fonts dialog now also allows you to select a piece font. The problem was always that this in itself wouldnot work, because there is no standardization in how Chess fonts map characters to piece symbols, so just altering the font would give you a completely messed-up board, with many pieces missing, and others displaying the wrong symbol. You would have to set the /fontPieceToCharTable as well, and it was hard to figure out how exactly.

I solved this now by printing the fontPieceToCharTable in the "sample" field of the piece font in the dialog. For other fonts this holds the font name written in the font, but for Chess fonts this would not result in something readable anyway. I also removed the disabled, read-only status of this sample field, so one can now edit it, and this will alter the fontPieceToCharTable through the menu! And when you choose a new Chess font, it will reset the sample field to the entire alphabet (upper+lower case), which you will then see printed as piece symbols. So it then is just a matter of sorting the symbols into canonical WinBoard ordering forpieceToCharTables, i.e. so that it contains the symbols you want to use for PNBRQKpnbrqk in exactly that order, and deleting the rest. (This would fail when the font also uses digits and punctuation for pieces you need, but not many fonts do that, and you can always type them yourself if the initial alphabetic string did not contain them.)