Playing chess (which font)?

[MBaas]

Looking at a replay of Morten's session at Dyalog08 about V12 Unicode, we can see that he used "APL385 Unicode" which is also configured as default font in V12.1 Unicode.

To test a new app, I was looking for some exciting unicode and thought chess might look nice. I am using "BabelMap" to explore unicode-fonts, so I searched for "Chess" and it displayed...no chess pieces :( Hmm, maybe a problem of that app? So I went to a vector-article from Morten about Unicode and tried to copy and paste the APL-Statement assigning chess-pieces to a var - and lost the pieces when pasting.

Could it be that "APL385 Unicode" as distributed with V12.1 does not contain the chess-symbols any more?

[AndyS|Dyalog]

You're absolutely correct - the APL385.ttf that was used at Dyalog '08 did have the chess characters in it, but subsequent versions don't.

Mind you, even in Morten's demo I notice that the example actually sets the font in the form (he used "Arial Unicode MS"): I think that that is the best way forwards. The chess pieces are defined to be in the Unicode font positions U+2654 to U+265F so something like the following will set you up:

white←⎕ucs 9811+⍳6 ⍝ King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn
black←⎕ucs 9817+⍳6

[MBaas]

Thanks Andy, meanwhile I got the font by mail, but am now getting an APLCORE when loading APL. I'll send it to support in a minute...

Thanks

Michael

[Morten|Dyalog]

Version 12.1 was distributed with an old version of the font. The latest version of the fonts should be available at http://www.dyalog.com/apl-font-keyboard.htm.

[woody]

Greetings.

I just successfully enabled the chess characters on DyalogAPL 12.1.1.
I am running the 32 bit version on MS Windows XP Pro.

1. Download the latest 385 UNICODE font from http://www.dyalog.com/apl-font-keyboard.htm
2. Remove the APL385.ttf from Windows FONTS folder.
3. Copy in the newer APL385.ttf into the FONTS folder.
4. Reboot computer.
5. Start DyalogAPL 12.1.1 and define the chess characters as follows:
white←⎕ucs 9811+⍳6 ⍝ King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn
black←⎕ucs 9817+⍳6
6. Done.

Cheers,

//W