For me - Chrome on Windows, the pieces are a little larger than the empty spaces. This causes the board to be shifted around a bit. For instance, the move you showed has the rook in line three half way between the second and third pawn in line 2. This is true for all three versions.
They line up, etc… But way too small. Can barely tell they are chess pieces. The Knights in particular look like irregular blobs. Regular font is better than new.
I could probably zoom the page but then I’d have to keep fudging with it.
This is probably going to be the big issue. People have the default size set to different amounts based on their screen size, preferences, etc. One-size-fits-all isn’t going to happen.
I think a monospace font like Courier New is definitely best for something like chess that absolutely requires alignment, if we have one. It doesn’t line up to me on Chrome though.
OSX, whatever the latest Firefox is: Both the code and the courier versions line up correctly for me, while the default font does not. However, in all cases, the characters for the pieces look blobby and somewhat indistinct. While individual sizes will vary, I suspect it might be a good idea to increase the base size by one step anyway.
For alignment purposes, I’ve always found it best to use the code tags. However, it does take tweaking to set up cleanly, as the edit font isn’t monospace.
In Chrome on my machine, all the periods and spaces as empty blocks are smaller than the characters in all formats, so it throws off alignment. All show the black pieces aligned with each other, the empty board section is squished left, the white pawns align with black, and the white row below has the empty spot for the knight throwing off spacing on the last line.
You may need to use more dots and spaces. That probably only works inside code tags. Default mode for web in all fonts seems to be to concatenate spaces (i.e. scrunch them).
Okay, I’ve been playing with this in Preview Post, and it appears the problem is that the Chess pieces are not the same width as the characters. I have not successfully found a way to fix the spacing issue. I have tried, in code tags
Changing the number of spaces. No joy.
Changing the … to … or … . No joy.
Changing the … to _ or __ . No joy.
Changing the size of the font for the spacing characters to 3, 4, and 5. 4 is too small and 5 is too big.
Yes, that seems to be the main problem, the Chess pieces are not the same width as the characters, the ones making the new ASCII characters should had made squares of the same width.
Oh well, I will experiment with other formats; I’m not trying to make a chess game, but the challenge is to make an easy to edit ascii set to show positions to other posters and students without having to link outside.
I suggest using a symbol other than ellipses. You want to be sure that all the chess symbols are being pulled from the same font. Ellipses are so far away from the chess pieces that they could easily be pulled from a different font. The chess pieces are almost certainly being substituted from a different font.
Symbols to consider instead of ellipses: ☐ ♢♦. You can make those a light gray so they won’t get in the way with the other pieces. For example:
Unfortunately, the a-h stuff are also from far off code points, and thus are likely to be rendered in a different font. I’d honestly just get the best you can, and stick with that.
