how to get larger board and chess pieces?

[evergreen1]

I want to know that whether larger board and chess pieces are available for use with winboard? if so kindly give instructions to incorporate them into winboard. thanks

[H.G.Muller]

WinBoard supports 18 different board sizes, which you can select from the View->Colors menu or just by sizing the board window. If the largest size ('titanic') is not large enough for you, there is nothing that can be done.

[evergreen1]

thanks for the direction. now the board size is set. kindly give instructions to change the pieces also. what do you mean by piece fonts ? how to bring it to winboard? thanks

[H.G.Muller]

Chess fonts are what you can download from here.

[evergreen1]

i have visited the site under reference and downloaded a few fonts. but what is fonts? is it something connected with the size and design of the chessmen?(i am concerned with that only) if it is so why in the FAQ it is said that some fonts have white places --lines--something like that?

[H.G.Muller]

Fonts are character representations where the glyphs do not have the shape of characters (be it Latin, Greek or Cyrillic characters or Chinese kanji) but of Chess pieces. (E.g. a B shows up as a white Bishop, etc.) Such fonts are often used when type-setting books about Chess, or for Chess problems to be printed in newspapers. For this reason they often provide not only bare pieces, but also pieces against backgrounds of light and dark squares as separate characters, and also characters to print a nicer board edge, or empty dark squares. There is plenty of room for that, as Chess only has 2x6 pieces, while the alphabet has 95 characters.

As fonts are typically scalable, WinBoard can use the characters of the font that represent bare types for displaying pieces. You would have to select the piece font through the View->Fonts dialog, and tick 'use piece font' in the View->Colors dialog.

Unfortunately there is no standardization for how to map letters on pieces, in these fonts. WinBoard should allow you to sort the characters of the font in the font dialog sample field in canonical order (i.e. first white PNBRQK, than black, and the rest deleted). If you start with total gibberish there, just delete it and start typing abcdefg.... until you see the glyphs appear that you would like to use, and remember what they were. (This info is usually included with the font downloads as well, btw.)

[evergreen1]

thanks HGM for the description about piece fonts.