Humbly thank all of you for your wonderful compliments.
I worked very hard by creating fine chess piece pics in Inkscape, an open source vector graphics editor. It was a painstaking job and it made me very exhausted and I slept more than 20 hours!!
I repetitively drew the outline of chess pieces so that they looked as close as to Staunton chess piece shapes like ones played in real tournaments. In addition, I carefully pick up right colors for the chess pieces and the board. That means, the colors of the chess pieces and the board must be different but in good harmony pleasing to the eyes. Also, this helps the chess pieces to look salient and thus it likely makes a chess player to overlook less in games.
Sorry, I don't know how to convert them to the .ttf font format. I googled some information or any utility software to convert scalable vector graphics to the .ttf font, but the search was fruitless.
Making ttf fonts isn't something done in five minutes. After you have imported or drawed your charachters you have to add hinting to it.
You can try FontForge if you really want to try. You find it here: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/. Best is if you have access to a linux machine, then it's even possible to find a prepared package, have a look in your package manager. I have installed it on a windows machine too but it is a lot of things to do. FontForge can import svg vectors. It also have some sort of (auto)anti-aliasing so maybe you don't need to go into this hinting problem at all just for drawing pieces.
Hi Eran
Like the piece set but I'm a little confused why you just didn't use 'Paint' on your PC for the shape of your pieces. It's so easy and just use another program to gradiant fill in their colours.
Have a look at the one's I designed for CEBoard on the Pocket PC (scroll down the page a little and you will see four of my piece sets). http://www.zanchetta.net/CEBoard/
Keep up the good work and maybe try 'Paint' for your next set, it may be a lot quicker.
Regards
Bryan
What's my next move? - to the fridge for another beer !!
Firstly, because Paint application does not support vector which is called scalable vector graphics format. So that's why I created chess piece pics in vector format for Rybka 3 Aquarium which I have now; only scalable vector graphics pics for chess pieces work with Aquarium.
Secondly, bitmap is raster which is not scalable. The image degrades when it is scaled to larger size. While, vector has a perfect smooth scaling. So, usually many chess players scale the chess board windows to any size from time to time while retaining perfect clear shapes of chess pieces. For more info check http://morovia.com/education/vector-raster.asp
Lastly, drawing chess pieces in a vector editor is much easier than drawing in a bitmap editors once you master them very well!!
Hi Eran
Thanks for such a comprehensive reply.
Obviously a lot harder to produce graphics for the PC than it is for the Pocket PC & Palm.
Regards
Bryan
What's my next move? - to the fridge for another beer !!
