If they’re still out of alignment, I’m going to guess this just isn’t possible to get exactly right. We don’t have the choice of a monospaced font that also has all those symbols.
Win 8.1, IE 11, and using 200% zoom on my tablet …
Everyone’s attempts all look pretty much the same. The chess pieces are fine and the empty space markers are too narrow, occupying roughly the 5 leftmost columns of pieces. Likewise any piece placed in the board is offset to the left proportionally.
Depends, are the invisible pawns on the white side or the black side? Do they get promoted to invisible queens? If so, my money is on the invisible side, and black and white are screwed.
Overall this is the solution that has worked the best on my browser(Firefox 26 on Windows 7 64-bit). All of the others had the blank spaces between the two sides misaligned.
Answer: using any symbol with color coded out to make it an “invisible” placeholder is too cumbersome. The beauty of GIGObuster’s original concept is the placeholders are single characters that, if not typed, can easily be cut/pasted and not throw off the table alignment while trying to construct the playing field. Because it’s not just the result that needs to be clear, but it needs to be easy enough to see alignment while making the moves to keep them in the right places.
(And I forgot a pawn. Caught on Preview, left in to demonstrate what is likely to happen.)
Yep, you got it. This needs to be simple to edit and it does not need to be 100% accurate to show a position, with the idea from Quartz I think that will be good enough for a message board, if there is a need for more precision or an actual game then one can link to outside sites.
Of course, that does not mean that there are no more improvements possible, I’m still looking for almost empty or neutral characters that are the same size as the chess pieces.
So far, with the ideas posted, it is good enough for [del]High school work[/del] a message board.
Posts 12, 19, and 21 are all mis-aligned for me. 26 and 29 work, but it’s hard to see where the pieces are relative to each other without a visible board. 32 works for the board, but the column letters aren’t aligned with the columns.
Is there anyone for whom the code tag version didn’t work?
I think that any solution that involves “tweaking” (picking characters of just the right size, changing font size for some characters but not others, etc.) is doomed to failure, because those details will all vary from platform to platform. I think that the only real solution will be forcing the characters to all render at the same spacing.
The unoccupied spaces are much wider than the pieces. On quoting, it looks like this is because the unoccupied spaces are flanked by space characters, while the pieces aren’t. Attempting to fix that:
EDIT: OK, that’s a little closer, but still not right. Is Garamonde a fixed-width font? I don’t think it’s even worth bothering to try without a fixed-width font.
I have the opposite experience to Chronos. Peter Morris’s work looks perfect. Chronos’s attempted improvements once again make the empty spaces about 40% too narrow.
Win 8.1, IE 11. The *empty spaces are too narrow *effect is invariant regardless of text zoom setting.
It’s probably more to do with the browser than anything.
I think we’re pretty much stuck though. Anything that has spaces will probably not work since spaces seem to render at different widths for different browsers, so unless there are an equal number of spaces per row, the spaces will mess things up.
The most likely thing that can be done is to find a character that has the same width as the chess pieces (and that isn’t a chess piece itself), and use that. I’ve been trying to find a character map that will do that, but to no avail. Ah well.
