Talk:Chess symbols in Unicode

Early comment

Weird. The chess characters have to be significantly enlarged to be the same size as letters. Thus it becomes hard to just have Nf3 where the N symbol looks good next to the f3.--Sonjaaa 19:04, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)

The problem is with fonts, as usual. — Monedula 19:19, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

here they simply don't show :S VodkaJazz

Can anyone recommend an open source font that includes these symbols? --Ken Seehart 00:57, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Note that :Arial Unicode MS and :Tahoma are MS proprietary and MS will not permit redistribution. I have tried :Code2000, which is very complete, but the chess pieces don't look very good (the King looks like a cow head). --Ken Seehart 00:57, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

According to http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/tahoma/list.htm the Tahoma font doesn't have the chess symbols. Where did the font come from that was used in the image? A free font that carries the unicode chess symbols would be http://mip.noekeon.org/HTMLTTChess/chess_merida_unicode.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.217.129.133 (talk) 15:07, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

What program even renders these Unicode characters correctly? Uranther 03:12, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Mozilla Firefox. — Monedula 06:50, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Any program on which you can set the font yourself... :P -- Jokes Free4Me 13:44, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

More symbols

Does anyone know about special notations using Unicode? I know of ± and ∓, but i would also like "+ over =" and "+ below =". Thanks in advance. -- Jokes Free4Me 13:44, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

They are ⩱ (U+2A71) and ⩲ (U+2A72). — Monedula 06:44, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I know I wanted one, so...

Here's a chess board:

8	♜	♞	♝	♛	♚	♝	♞	♜
7	♟	♟	♟	♟	♟	♟	♟	♟
6
5
4
3
2	♙	♙	♙	♙	♙	♙	♙	♙
1	♖	♘	♗	♕	♔	♗	♘	♖
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

Your welcome! Stale Fries ^{taste better} 01:42, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

nice. i just googled for one of these, and here i found it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.212.32.155 (talk) 04:57, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

good job! now we just need to implement the chess rules in CSS or JS (a CSS implementation would be better as it tethers to people running without javascript support, NoScript & the likes, while a JS implementation would be much easier to implement, IMO..) Divinity76 (talk) 14:10, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Doesn't work in my browser

I'm currently viewing this article with K-meleon, which includes a pretty up-to-date version of the "Gecko" engine used by Firefox, and therefore ought to be able to handle Unicode OK. Philcha (talk) 12:02, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Web browsers don't always come configured to render Unicode correctly. Have you looked into the rendering options of K-meleon? Luis Dantas (talk) 12:09, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

No, but then how many Wikipedia readers are aware of such technical details (I'm not, and I've worked with computers for decades!). That suggests either this article needs revision to ensure it works with common browsers "out of the box" or we need another one that works with common browsers "out of the box" so that we can link to it in other relevant articles (see Talk:Chess). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Philcha (talk • contribs) 01:40, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Well I also just viewed the article with K-meleon (version 1.1.2, on Windows XP) and had no problems with the characters. I don't think I've changed much settings in K-meleon, though I may have added extra Unicode fonts in Windows, I'm not sure. Vadmium (talk) 09:45, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Of course! Half of me feels ashamed for not thinking of that (the other half thinks "On Wikipedia I'm in user mode, not tech mode"). I've edited the article to point out the need to download an appropriate character set, with a ref. Thanks! Philcha (talk) 12:30, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Queries

What about fairy chess pieces in unicode?176.250.146.99 (talk) 12:17, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Alas, no. There is not even a real consensus for what to call them, much less what to represent them by. Without a graphical representation, they can't go in Unicode, which doesn't encode abstract characters with meanings but no fixed representations. So, no, not even the princess (B+N), empress (R+N), and amazon (Q+N) that just about everyone would have invented independently. Double sharp (talk) 15:50, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

There is a proposal at https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17034r3-n4784r-fairy-chess.pdf Daira Hopwood ⚥ (talk) 04:49, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

They have been added in the Chess Symbols block with Unicode 12.0, released March 5, 2019. Nellisks (talk) 13:44, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

History

Looking at the Unicode encoding, I see that the white pieces have consecutive numbers, but the black pieces all have the same number with a letter suffix. This suggests to me that the white pieces were an earlier, perhaps original part of the unicode and that black symbols were an afterthought. That does make some sense: if you want to transcribe a chess match using algebraic notation, you don't need to distinguish colour, because the first move of each pair is always white. In fact, I'm not sure what the black symbols are necessary for, though they are obviously cool. So just wondering: if anyone knows the history of this - when this came in the development of unicode, or even who motivated it - it would be an interesting two-sentence appendix. --Doric Loon (talk) 22:58, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Um. A comes after 9. These are hexadecimal numbers. Double sharp (talk) 15:38, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Non-piece information

Anyone know of any effort to document the state information that is not directly a piece? For example, one board where the last move allow en-passant, vs one that is exactly the same piece placement, but the move order do not allow en-passant now. Most engines document that graphically in one way or another (highlight last move, arrows, etc).

or maybe even state that no engine UI bothers to show today, such as castleling opportunity being spent or not.