Does anyone know of an app or software that works for converting a hand written scoresheet into a PGN file?
I tried several regular OCR softwares, but they end up gibberish. Just wondering if anyone else knew of a good one…
Thanks!
Well, if you’ve looked at most scoresheets, you’ll see that they are gibberish. GIGO.
When I did the U.S. Masters, which I can’t believe was ten years ago, the top boards were DGT boards. The technical wizard on staff positioned cameras over each board and volunteers were asked to transcribe the games after. Surely there are better technical solutions now, and in any event this seems completely impractical for your needs, kind of like using the newspaper morgues to find past state champions.
1 Like
The DGT electronic boards used in the candidates are a better technical solution - albeit expensive - but that won’t help for an existing scoresheet.
There are apps such as chessscan that will take a board and try to give you an fen description but I haven’t seen a good scoresheet - pgn one.
1 Like
Some years ago I was asked to help process scoresheets from the top boards at the US Open for the tournament bulletin. It would take 10-20 minutes to go through the scoresheets for both players and type a complete and accurate record of the moves into a computer, then that would be handed over to the bulletin editors to decide which scoresheets to include in the bulletin and add some commentary.
Some scoresheets were pristine, others were nearly illegible. (Mine probably fell into the latter category.)
But this gives me an opportunity to tell my favorite Jerry Hanken story.
Years ago, Jerry was playing Eric Schiller in a tournament in California. At one point, Eric reached over for Jerry’s scoresheet to update his. Jerry nearly blew a fuse and called for a TD, who informed him that the rules allowed his opponent to consult his scoresheet on his own time.
Several months later, Eric and Jerry were paired up in another event.
This time midway through the game Jerry reached over to grab Eric’s scoresheet to update his own. After looking at it for a few moments, he called for a TD. “I can’t read this scoresheet, is that legal?”, Jerry asked. Eric informed him that it was written in Thai. The TD looked at Eric’s scoresheet and started reading off the moves, the TD also knew Thai!
1 Like
So far I have found three apps that claim to be able to scan a scoresheet and convert it to a pgn.
Chess lens supposedly can do this, but it is only for iPhones and I have an Android.
Chess digitizer is for Android or iOS, but it has a 1 star review, so I would hate to pay money to find out if it really works…
Then there is chesscan, but digging deeper, it can only scan boards or diagrams of boards, not scoresheets.
That is all I have found so far.
Okay, for those who may be interested, I tried out Chess Digitizer, which you can use for free, if you don’t choose to use the “engine enhancement” feature.
I used the app to take a picture of this scoresheet:
And used the app like so to make the game:
It seems like a really handy tool that has a few shortcomings.
#1. It is rocket science to line up the page perfectly, because when you take the picture, you don’t see the boxes of what it wants. So you take the picture, then look at it with the boxes, and re-take the picture because it didn’t line up, and you do this several times.
#2. It can’t fix bad handwriting. To be honest, there are a few moves on this scoresheet that I can’t read either, but overall it is pretty good handwriting.
#3. It can’t fix the wrong move being recorded.
But, on the plus side, you can. If you know that was the wrong move, or doesn’t match at all, you can click on that move and it uses the built in engine to show you legitimate moves from that position, and then you can enter the correct one.
Once you do that, you can have it recalculate the remaining moves based on this change, which is really handy.
But, I had to personally fix about 50% of the guessed moves on this scoresheet after the app scanned it. And, the last 3 moves don’t work, no matter how you do it, as written they don’t exist. So either there was an error in writing the moves (no legit or logical moves work) or some moves were missed, then they continued writing after the fact.
I think it could work if:
a. You mounted the phone in some sort of holder that was perfectly lined up with the sheets (after trial and error to find that perfect camera angle/distance).
b. If your players wrote legibly and accurately. (This is probably the hardest part…) 
EDIT: The screen shot I put in shows more than 50% wrong, but when you fix one move, you click recalculate, and it guesses the remaining moves a bit better.
EDIT 2: https://chessdigitizer.com/
EDIT 3: There also seems to be no export function, so you can’t export the pgn to use elsewhere, at least at this point. It has a share button, but when I click it the app crashes.
So what happens after you create the pgn? Are you not able to download it at all? If you need to copy it down by hand, I see limited value.
And, sadly for the scoresheets you’ll likely see in Alaska (not exactly the Candidates) will include a large number of “random” moves. The predictive value is much less when you can’t trust either, or both, players to make logical, if flawed, moves. I’ve mentioned before watching two players try to reconstruct a game using their scoresheets, and failing because they couldn’t believe that one moved a knight two squares diagonally and neither noticed. (I was watching and assured them that really did happen.)
Accurate scoresheets and logical, not to say legal, moves are the key to getting these things to work, even more than legibility.
1 Like
Well, there were of course only a limited number of DGT boards. Besides, DGT boards are inherently fallible. If a player drags a piece or even places a piece on a square and changes his mind, or possibly even places a piece on a square not centered, not to mention makes an illegal move, it is hard for any hardware-software combo to work well.
1 Like
In the continuing effort to find good OCR/PGN score sheet scanning software, I have made a comparison about 3 apps that actually work. If you are interested, you can read the whole writeup here:
I compared Chess Digitizer
And PawnParse
https://www.pawnparse.com/
And pgnApp
https://pgn-app.com/
I used the same 3 scoresheets to make an objective test, and here was the findings:
Which one should you use?
It is really hard to say at this point. With any written argument, there is a subjective side, and an objective side.
Objectively, PawnParse would be the way to go with the least amount of total instances of character recognition failure, and also was the only software that could scan the half sized score sheets (though it did require some manual intervention to line up/resize the boxes).
Subjectively, while pgnApp had the most polished feel, and was the most intuitive to use, especially with the ability to move pieces on the board to correct the score sheet, it occasionally left me wondering if it had transcribed the moves correctly, or just thought it did, making me double check the “good moves” as well as going through the “dubious” ones, since it only shows the dubious ones by default. I enjoyed using both PawnParse and pgnApp, and I would use either, but I liked the more straight forward approach of PawnParse better, especially being able to see the entire scoresheet while editing. I didn’t like using Chess Digitizer very much, because lining up the score sheet for the photo seemed like an impossible task.
I list all three apps pros and cons, as well.
Perhaps you can try some of these as well, and give your thoughts, too.
1 Like
I wonder how any app to read scoresheets would handle mistakes? I routinely see Rd8 confused with Re8 or even Rd1. Also common are juxtapositions of adjacent ranks or files. A human can usually figure out these mistakes instantly. But what about when the player omits a move, or even worse, a move pair? Scholastic chess coaches quickly learn how to decipher notation errors (sometimes).
So, I can’t speak on behalf of these apps, but…
In all three apps, if the player wrote the wrong move, or in the wrong block, or skipped moves, it is a big problem.
In my writeup, I used three scoresheets and two of them had known player errors, e.g., the player wrote the wrong move or a move or two were missing.
PgnApp tries to force legal moves, so in some respects, did okay with this, such as a move like (like, because I don’t remember the actual moves off hand) Qc4 being written as Qc6, which was illegal, and it did a most probable guess and got it right, sometimes.
PawnParse developer was discussing the idea with me of having the computer look through the game and see what moves would allow the game to continue and the rest of the scoresheet be correct - potentionally filling in missing moves. This is not functional yet, but seems like a good idea.
Currently, you just get a flag and you need to manually adjust the sheet.
An AI program might be able to fix many of these scoresheet errors by looking further down the scoresheet for data to resolve conflicts/errors.
Do I know how to write such an AI beast? Nope, nor is that an area I’m likely to delve into.
After my last review of the three main apps for pgn/OCR scanners, the developer of Chess Digitizer reached out to me to inform me that I was using an old version of his app. So I edited my original review to say that it was an older version, and made a new post about the latest version:
It does work a lot better than before, though I did still have a few problems with the pictures for one of the four score sheets. If you are an avid tournament player and want to have a score sheet to pgn converter in your pocket, this might be worth looking at.
1 Like