ICS & NICBase
steve davis
I have nicbase version 3, and a couple hundred ICS games in my mailbox.
The conversion utils I've tried haven't worked. Is there a good way
to import ICS games into nicbase?
--
Steven C. Davis
da...@umdsun2.umd.umich.edu
Daniel Sleator
all games mailed to you will be PGN.
D. Sleator (a.k.a. Darooha)
--
Daniel Sleator Office: 412-268-7563
Professor of Computer Science Fax: 412-681-5739
Carnegie Mellon University Home: 412-362-8675
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 sle...@cs.cmu.edu
Karl Schwamb
Daniel Sleator says:
ICS will mail you games in PGN format. Just "set mailformat 1", and
all games mailed to you will be PGN.
If the following is added to the mail message header then MIME
cognizant mailers can view the PGN games directly:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/chess_pgn; charset="us-ascii"
(MIME mailers can handle multimedia mail messages.) With a MIME compliant
mailer such as Exmh, the mail message is shown with something like:
You have received a chess game in PGN format.
charset = us-ascii
(Invoke menu with right button.)
at which point you click right to get a menu which lets you fire
up a PGN viewer (such as XBoard) in the background. Of course, you
have to add a line to your .mailcap file to associate the new MIME
type text/chess_pgn with the xboard invocation.
The beauty of this is that anyone (including ICS) can send PGN
games to users which are then viewable in a GUI with a few mouse
clicks. No cutting and pasting nonsense. MIME mailers also
support multipart messages -- so several games can be sent in
a single mail message. You can also send html, postscript, gifs,
and audio using MIME.
MIME is the same type system underlying mosaic. The site at URL
http://www.ub.uit.no/chess.html is using the MIME type chess/pgn
but I find the text/chess_pgn type better since the mail composition
process can use text handling procedures.
So does this sound like a reasonable thing to add to ICS mail messages?
-Karl
--
-Karl