Re: [XBoard-devel] chess fonts

[Tim Mann]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 12:13:13 -0500, Jason Dorje Short <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm trying to get GPL'd images for chess pieces in SVG format.
> 
> (Background: my chess program loads the SVG images at runtime.  This 
> allows dynamic resizing of the chess pieces as the window resizes - a 
> very nice effect.  The current images I have were created from the 
> xboard bitmaps using autotrace; however this doesn't give very good 
> results.  So I have the choice of finding graphics somewhere or 
> attempting to draw them myself.)
> 
> The README in xboard's bitmaps directory claims that the metafont 
> sources for the chess bitmaps may be obtained from the original author 
> (Elmar Bartel) under the GPL.  However this notice is 10 years old. 
> Does anyone now have a copy of these metafont sources?  If so I would 
> like a copy (which I will try to put into SVG using fontforge, which I 
> think is possible although I have little experience with this).

Did you try asking Elmar or are you just assuming that everything times
out after 10 years?  Anyway, I still have a copy of the elch metafont
sources too.  I'll attach it.

> I also think if anyone has these sources still, they should/must be put 
> into the xboard source distribution or at least made easily available. 
> My interpretation of the GPL is that GPL'd image sources (SVG or font 
> data)  should follow exactly the same rules as source code for "normal" 
> programs.  This may not apply in this case because the copyright is 
> still held by the original author, but there's no reason that I can see 
> *not* to include them.

Well, if you want to get technical about the GPL, saying that you have
to email someone to get a copy is in accordance with the GPL, even
though it's not as convenient as saying to go to a certain web or ftp
address.

Also, it's not normal for every GPL project that uses other GPL projects
to include the source code for the projects it uses in its own source
distribution.  In fact, that would be silly.

In this case, though, since xboard is probably the only other GPL
project that uses elch and it may not be up on the web or an ftp site
elsewhere (or at least not easy to find), it would make sense to put it
on xboard's savannah pages as a separate download.  I'll do that soon.

> Finally I'd suggest that if possible xboard/winboard should also load 
> and render the SVG files directly at runtime.  My program uses GTK and 
> GDK, so loading SVG is trivial using librsvg.  Using XAW I have no idea 
> what, if any, library xboard could use for this.

Nor do I.  Are you interested in finding out and contributing the code
to do it?  Otherwise suggesting that xboard "should" do something
usually won't get you far.

Another thing to note is that xboard's bitmaps are somewhat hand-tuned.
The smaller sizes are tweaked a lot, and even many of the larger ones
are at least hand-centered (though the centering would of course be
feasible to automate).  metafont just doesn't do that perfect a job, and
the last time I used it, at least, it didn't do any anti-aliasing.

This hand-tuning is another reason why xboard includes the bitmap images
in its source distribution rather than having rules in its makefile to
recompile them from elch sources.

-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/

elch.tar.gz
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bitmaps.fselch.tar.gz
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