The Custom Chess Toolbar Of OoChess

The OoChess templates have four custom toolbars that provide a number of functions useful for making a chess document. We'll take a quick look at each of these toolbars and give a quick overview of the many functions they provide. We'll start with the most important of these custom toolbars, the Chess Toolbar.

The Chess Toolbar

 

The Chess Toolbar has all the functionality you'll need to use chess figurines and diagrams.

The first two icons, going from left to right. form the Figurine Group.

 The first is the Make Figurines icon.  With this tool you can select a section of text in your document and then have the tool scan across the text, looking for chess moves, and have them converted to figurines. Only text determined to be chess moves will be converted to figurines, the remaining text is left untouched.

The second icon is Select Language. Here you can choose between a number of languages supported by whatever chess font you are using. Essentially, you use this to tell the template which piece letters are being used for the particular language you are writing in:

 Following the Figurine Group, is the Tools icon:

This provides you with a number of useful text transformation tools. You select some text, then click on the the Tools icon. From there you can choose from a number of options: Remove Newlines, Convert PGN Pieces, Format PGN Tags, and Convert CB Pieces. The first of these options simply removes all the newlines form the selected text thereby creating a single paragraph. This is useful if you happen to paste a PGN game directly into your document. Convert PGN Pieces is handy if you are writing in a language other than English. If you insert a PGN game directly into your document, you may want to convert the English PGN piece letters, PNBRQK, to whatever your chosen language uses. Similarly the Convert CB Pieces will look for the letters used by Chess Base for its figurines and will convert them to the standard English piece letters. Finally, the Format PGN Tags helps deal with the PGN Tag section of a PGN game that you may have inserted directly into your document. (See the manual for more details.)

 The next group on the toolbar is called the Play Moves Group:

 This is by far the most important group of all the OoChess custom toolbars. This group controls many aspects of the integrated chess board.

The first icon is the Play Moves Settings. This controls a few variables that determine how moves are parsed for playback.

The next icon is the Copy FEN To Clipboard.

This simply copies the current position on the integrated chess board onto the system clipboard as a FEN. This allows you to paste the FEN into the GUI of a chess engine for analysis.

 The next two icons, the M+ and M-,  are Board Save and Board Restore. These two buttons allow you to save and then restore the current position on the integrated chess board. You can only save one copy of the board at any one time. You can use this while working with a registered diagram as well, even if you are kibitzing on the diagram.

The next icon is the Setup Position icon:

This is another important tool for making diagrams. It open up a special dialog that allows you to set up a position on the integrated board just by clicking on the various pieces in the dialog on the right and then clicking on the squares of the board you want the pieces on:

 The last three icons in this group are for the most important functions provided by the OoChess templates. The first is the Make Diagram icon:

This, very naturally, makes diagrams. For the most part, all you would want to do is insert a diagram of the current position that is on the integrated board. (This is the board on which moves are played out by the template.) This is indeed what happens when you press this button -- the current position on the integrated board is inserted at the cursor. But you can also use this icon to transform a selected line of text into a diagram, assuming that you have selected either a FEN string or a Piece List in your document. Here is a FEN of the initial position and a an example of a piece list:

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1

Pe2 Ke4 / Ke6

 The next icon in the Play Moves Group is Reset Position:

This simply resets the integrated board to the initial position, just as if you were starting a new game.

It can also be used to copy a position from an existing chess diagram in the document to the internal board. (A very handy feature that allows you to ultimately copy a FEN of the diagram to the clipboard so that you can paste that into a chess engine to further analyze the position. We'll look into this nice feature later on. )

The last icon in this group is the Play Moves icon:

This attempts to play out a series of chess moves within some selected text. If no text is selected then nothing happens. Consider this short example:

1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 b6

This is the starting position of the Queen's Indian Defense.

You can select the moves above and then click on the Play Moves icon. The programming will search for chess moves within the selected text and will attempt to play them out on the integrated chess board. All non-chess move text will be ignored and skipped over by the move parser.

Once you have played these moves on the integrated chess board, you can insert the new position into your document by clicking on the Make Diagram icon. In our example, you'd get this diagram inserted at the location of the cursor:

 

The Play Moves icon is also used to prepare a series of moves for playback on a registered diagram.

The next group of icons is called the Diagram Group:

The first icon, Select Diagram Font, allows you to choose which font you want to use for the next diagram to be inserted of the next set of figurines to be used. For example, if you were using the Alpine template, and had all three of the available chess fonts, you'd be able to select one of them: Linares, Hastings or Zurich.

Once you have selected a font, the Select Diagram Font icon will change its appearance to that of the black knight of the chosen font.

The next icon, Diagram Settings, allows you to set various aspects of the diagram such as font size and justification (Left, Centered or Right.)

The last three icons allow you to quickly choose a diagram size:

The options, from left to right are: Small, Medium or Large. The actual font sizes are set by you using the above Diagram Settings icon. Notice that whichever diagram size you choose, that will be shown in black, whereas the other will be grayed out. I the example above, the chosen diagram size is the middle one, or Medium.


The last group of icons is called the Border/Extra Group:

The first icon in this group is the Special Square Markers.You can use this to set any empty square in a diagram to use a special marker, usually an X or a + sign, or sometimes even a star. This is useful to point out important squares on the diagram.

Next is the Select Border icon. This allows you to do just that -- select any one of the diagram borders supported by the chosen chess font. The most important of these borders are the single and double borders. Both of these can also have the algebraic notation around the border, a to h for files and 1 to 8 for ranks. This icon will change its appearance to reflect your chosen border type.

The very last icon in this group is the Flip Board icon:

You can choose to have your diagram 'Flipped' so that Black appears at the bottom of the diagram instead of White. To do this, simply click on the Flip Board Icon. All subsequent diagrams that you insert will be 'Flipped' showing the Black pieces at the bottom of the diagram and the White pieces at the top. Note that the Flip Board Icon itself will always be rotated to indicate the current state. In the example above, White is at the bottom and Black is at the top of the diagram.

 Well there you have it, a quick description of the Chess Toolbar.

A Temple