Some of the gray hairs might remember who I am, but don’t admit it in public.
I have a ton of questions getting answered about directing again, but one question I would like to have answered I hope is appropriate here:
What is the best software for preparing games for publication, either on the web or in print? In the future, I think it is a good idea to make game scores know to players, for use in local or regional publications, or even Chess Life.
I assume that most software has some sort of function for entering game scores into a database: But is there a package that is better than others in terms of features (adding diagrams, for example) than others?
I am sure there are some good programs out there. I would like to know what the best are as well. I have used Fritz and Chessbase Light [some problems with Light] in the past. In the far past I used the standard word program on the computer & created diagrams using Excel [shade every other cell/square and use one of the “chess” fonts] to publish a club bulletin.
I wrote a program first in COBOL then transcribed to C to enter games called chess2.exe near the bottom of my webpage. It predates PGN and uses 00 and 000 (zeros) for castling, no “=” on a promotion move, and 1. e3 e6 2. Nc3 Bb4 3. Nge2 is necessary since the ambiguity stuff runs before king safety kicks in–the g can’t be ignored. It could be converted to PGN with a few macros in a good text editing program though.
I wrote it when I was preparing games for our state’s publication and changed it often for several years as I got scoresheets with different mistakes on them. HTH
If you want to publish games without comments on your website, consider the free DGT Chess Theater.
I always use Fritz or Chessbase and copy the gamescore and diagrams into MS Word. There are some small problems with changing the size of the diagrams in Word. If you want color, use paste special and choose either device independent bitmap or just bitmap.
I suspect that ChessMaster will also allow you to copy to Word. Open Office is another option if you don’t like Word.
Finally, if you own a chess font, you can work directly in Word without using a chess playing program but it can be tedious.
The daily bulletins I did for the US Women’s Chess Championship (saintlouischessclub.org/US-Women … /bulletins) were done using ChessBase (Fritz would work just as well) and MS Word/Publisher.
The problem noted above with the diagram sizes can be dealt with by just a few mouse clicks to adjust all the digrams at once if you use Word’s Styles and Formatting feature.
As for the online games replayer for the same tournament (saintlouischessclub.org/US-Women … es/round01) we used Palview with a little customization that was fairly simple once you get into it.
Thank you all for the advice, looks liek I may have to spend some more money on PC stuff. Sad to say, my books are so outdated…
Two more questions:
Is there a summary of rule changes since the last edition of the rulebook on the site. I keep looking, but I have not seen it yet.
I have called the office a couple of times, and have not gotten a response back, so let me ask here: I know my TD status lapsed in 2006. I need to renew my status as a TD so I can direct events again. What do I need to do to get this done? I have not seen an application on the site to do this, other than getting club director status, and if I need to retest to get my Senior TD status back, that’s fine with me. I just need guidance on on how to get the process started.
I guess it depends where you searched. If you searched while in the Forums, you will only get posts in the Forums, because that’s the database it searches (But ‘rulebook update’ should have hit on something.)
If you search from the home page, you get everything in the Joomla (Content Management System) database.
There are a lot of things on the website that don’t pop up on either search, because they’re not stored in either of those databases. I don’t have a remedy for that.
‘rulebook update’ led to the rules URL as the 3rd choice. ‘rulebook changes’ gives the rules URL as 7th choice. (Tried it… that’s how I got there; but I had an idea of which URL I was after since I’d been there before. )
We can’t control which of the choices sort to the top of the list. But the text accompanying the choices should have made it easy to figure out which one was the right link.
)