Author: Andreas Stabel
Date: 03:23:55 05/23/01
In the Unicode standard, page U+2600 to U+26FF = Miscellaneous Symbols, there are defined symbols for the chess pieces. U+2654 is the white king, U+2655 = white queen, U+2656 = white rook, U+2657 = white bishop, U+2658 = white knight and U+2659 = white pawn. Then follows the black pieces in the same order: U+265A = black king, ..., U+265F = black pawn. I made a small program that could generate chess boards in the Unicode file format, but it turns out that none of the programs I have for viewing Unicode text files show theese symbols. I've tried Word, Wordpad, Notepad, Netscape, Internet explorer and more. I think the reason is that the fonts installed on my Windows 2000 machine do not contain theese symbols. They do contain the symbols for cards = Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs which are also defined in the same Unicode page, so there is no fundamental reason why I cannot view the chess symbols. Does anybody know of a program that I can use to see Unicode text using the chess symbols or perhaps how I can install fonts which contain them ? Do other operating systems have theese symbols installed f.ex. Linux ? It would have been nice to be able to use a world-wide text standard like Unicode to exchange chess boards together with text, so I hope at least in the future theese symbols will be included in the fonts also on Microsoft products. Best regards Andreas Stabel
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