Re: [XBoard-devel] chess fonts

[Jason Dorje Short]

Tim Mann wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 12:13:13 -0500, Jason Dorje Short <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > 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).
>
> Did you try asking Elmar or are you just assuming that everything times
> out after 10 years?  Anyway, I still have a copy of the elch metafont
> sources too.  I'll attach it.

I e-mailed him right before sending my mail to the list, but I haven't 
gotten a reply.  Thanks for your quick response.

> > 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.
>
> Nor do I.  Are you interested in finding out and contributing the code
> to do it?  Otherwise suggesting that xboard "should" do something
> usually won't get you far.

Naturally.

For rendering SVG in X11 Cairo looks like the only solution, but I don't 
think it is mature enough yet to add as a hard requirement.  Another 
alternative, of course, is "upgrading" xboard to use GTK.

> Another thing to note is that xboard's bitmaps are somewhat hand-tuned.
> The smaller sizes are tweaked a lot, and even many of the larger ones
> are at least hand-centered (though the centering would of course be
> feasible to automate).  metafont just doesn't do that perfect a job, and
> the last time I used it, at least, it didn't do any anti-aliasing.

SVG files can easily be hand-tuned in this way.  Inkscape (or Sodipodi) 
makes an excellent editor for improving the images.

jason