Crosstable Insertion With OoChess

The OoChess Template's handy helper program can perform a number of complex tasks. One of those tasks is the ability to create a crosstable from an event selected from within a PGN file, and then insert that table into the Writer document at the cursor. Inserting a crosstable is actually a two-stage process. In the first stage, the PGN file is read by the helper program to generate a list of the events that are in the file so that they can be displayed in the Insert Crosstable Dialog. In the second stage, the Dialog is presented to the user allowing him to select an event from the PGN file and to set a number of formatting options. Once the event and the options have been set, the user can press the OK button to complete the insertion process.

To begin, click on the Insert Crosstable Icon on the Chess Insertion Toolbar:

 Find the PGN file that contains the games of the event you want a crosstable generated for and then inserted into your document. Then click Open. You will see a brief flash of a black window on the screen. Don't worry, this is the OoChess helper program. It is a simple Console program written in C. After a PGN file is selected, it gets called to generate a list of all the events in the file so that it can be used by the Insert Crosstable Dialog which appears next:

There are a number of options for inserting a Crosstable.

Borders, quite naturally, determines whether there will be a border around your crosstable.

Padding provides left and right padding around the crosstable elements. The units are in twips. Here is the same crosstable with a 10 twip padding and another with a 50 twip padding:

The maximum twip value allowed is 100.

Font Size sets the font size to be used for all the text in the crosstable. The options are 8, 10, 12 and 14 points.

Name Format determines the format used for displaying each players name in the crosstable. The options are: Last Name Only, Last Name + First Name Initial, and Complete Name. These correspond to:

Fischer
Fischer, R
Fischer, Robert James

Max Swiss Players. Many chess tournaments are Open tournaments where there are a set number of rounds to be played, but there are a great many participants, far too many to be able to have every player play against each other as in a Round Robin. Such a tournament is generally called a Swiss tournament. You can use the Max Swiss Players setting to tell the program to limit the number of players to include in the Swiss crosstable to what you want. With the default set at 20, the program will only include the top 20 player's results in the crosstable. This applies only to a Swiss crosstable!

Title simply tells the program to include the titles of each player in the crosstable if they are available.

Elo tells the program to include the Elo ratings of each player in the crosstable if they are available.

Perf Elo determines whether or not the program will include a Performance Rating column at the end of the crosstable. This uses FIDEs own formula for determining a player's performance rating. In order to be able to use this option, all the players in an event must have an Elo rating. If any player is found to not have a rating, the program will not write the Performance Rating column.

The helper program can create only three types of crosstables: Match, Round Robin and Swiss. Luckily, these three comprise almost all types of chess events.

The Match Crosstable

Here is an example of the Match crosstable:

The Round Robin Crosstable

Here is the Round Robin crosstable from the recently held Tata Steel tournament in Wijk aan Zee:

OoChess can also create Round Robin crosstables for multi-round events:

For Round Robin events, the program uses Sonneborn-Berger for tiebreaks.

The Swiss Crosstable

Here is an example of the Swiss crosstable commonly used for Open events: