Revised PGN standard available
Steven J Edwards
Implementation Guide has been uploaded to the chess.uoknor.edu ftp site;
it should soon appear as the ASCII text file "pub/chess/PGN/Standard".
It is also available by e-mail from me; just mail me a request and it's
on its way.
This new revision is based upon the corrections and extensions helpfully
provided by the various reviewers over the past two weeks. Although there
is much new material, there is still a need for better coverage of areas
dealing with annotation. Efforts on this and other topics is continuing.
As always, I rely upon the contributions of the reviewers; I'm still
working on integrating earlier comments, so one may expect that the PGN
document will have more revisions in the future. However, the basic parts
of the SAN and PGN tag/movetext definitions will not change. This means
that the core software written to these standards should not have to
changed, although it may be extended as the specification is further
elaborated.
This, the 1993.12.19 version, is about 50 Kbyte long and takes about two
dozen pages on the printer.
Some well-revised areas include:
*** Appendix E: PGN Software: This appendix describes five different PGN
software packages along with their ftp location and author e-mail contacts.
If you are mentioned on this list, please keep me informed regarding any
corrections or updates to your package. If I've missed any PGN software,
please let me know of this as well so I may incorporate your description
into the document.
*** Appendix G: International Olympic Committee country codes: This appendix
provides over 150 different IOC country codes as used by FIDE. Use of these
is recommended for providing Site tag information. Note that there are two
codes for Sweden; I'm not sure which is the preferred one. Also, I added a
code just for us; see if you can find it.
*** Appendix H: Additional chess data standards: This appendix covers the
chess standard FEN (position notation). It will also cover the EPD (Extended
Position Description) as that standard is further developed.
*** Appendix I: Alternative chesspiece identifier letters: This appendix
gives a table of piece identifier letters in various languages. It is
included only for those software authors that have a need to present chess
data using a language other than English for piece identification. These
identifier letters are not intended for use for archival PGN storage or for
PGN data passed among different programs.
-- Steven (s...@world.std.com)
Conrad J. Sabatier
I don't recall seeing any mention of it in the last standard that was
released), and which I feel would be of enormous value, is to provide a
facility, "a la Chessbase", for recording side variations in the game text,
viewing them onscreen and then returning to the point in the main line
from which they branched. This would of course necessitate the creation of
an additional set of functions within existing PGN programs (if not a
complete rewrite), but I think the usefulness of such a feature would make
it well worth the extra programming effort. I think most of us would much
prefer actually playing through analyses to simply reading them.
--
Conrad Sabatier -- con...@nola.win.net | "Melt the guns." -- XTC
Steven J Edwards
PGN allows for RAVs (Recursive Annotion Variations) in the movetext
that support side variations. Thus, the traditional use of (sometimes
nested) side variations in print media is supported in the PGN
standard.
Of course, some programs may not support this part of the standard
(yet), and others may vary as towards the treatment of these side
variations. However, I have no doubt that interactive features like
those you've mentioned will soon be part of perusal services of PGN
using programs.
-- Steven (s...@world.std.com)