[XBoard-devel] chess fonts

[Jason Dorje Short]

I'm trying to get GPL'd images for chess pieces in SVG format.

(Background: my chess program loads the SVG images at runtime.  This 
allows dynamic resizing of the chess pieces as the window resizes - a 
very nice effect.  The current images I have were created from the 
xboard bitmaps using autotrace; however this doesn't give very good 
results.  So I have the choice of finding graphics somewhere or 
attempting to draw them myself.)

The README in xboard's bitmaps directory claims that the metafont 
sources for the chess bitmaps may be obtained from the original author 
(Elmar Bartel) under the GPL.  However this notice is 10 years old. 
Does anyone now have a copy of these metafont sources?  If so I would 
like a copy (which I will try to put into SVG using fontforge, which I 
think is possible although I have little experience with this).

I also think if anyone has these sources still, they should/must be put 
into the xboard source distribution or at least made easily available. 
My interpretation of the GPL is that GPL'd image sources (SVG or font 
data)  should follow exactly the same rules as source code for "normal" 
programs.  This may not apply in this case because the copyright is 
still held by the original author, but there's no reason that I can see 
*not* to include them.

Finally I'd suggest that if possible xboard/winboard should also load 
and render the SVG files directly at runtime.  My program uses GTK and 
GDK, so loading SVG is trivial using librsvg.  Using XAW I have no idea 
what, if any, library xboard could use for this.

thanks,
Jason Short