For the specification of a number of squares (e.g. the starting squares of the pawns) I support a shorthand I.D. where you only have to specify the lower left and upper right corner of a rectangular board area, separated by a dash. That doesn't help much in Smess, but for Xiangqi a0-i4 would give you the entire area below the River, and d0-f2 the white Palace.
Still, having to fully write down the list of coordinates for nearly all board squares is probably more cumbersome than using a FEN-like notation for the entire board. That would require the property of the square to be encoded by a single character, though. But that character could encode an index in a table of the properties. Like
a: R; b: BvR; c: BsR; d: fRrRfrB; ...
acabcbaca/bdbcacbdb/...
(Just a move assignment I made up on the spot.) For irregular patterns like Smess there is no way to avoid specifying all squares explicitly, but regular cases one often encounters are homogeneous ranks, alternating squares on a rank, identical ranks or pairs of ranks. This is acually a problem that is very similar to coloring of the board, so the solution you use in the Diagram Designer for that should be applicable here.
For the specification of a number of squares (e.g. the starting squares of the pawns) I support a shorthand I.D. where you only have to specify the lower left and upper right corner of a rectangular board area, separated by a dash. That doesn't help much in Smess, but for Xiangqi a0-i4 would give you the entire area below the River, and d0-f2 the white Palace.
Still, having to fully write down the list of coordinates for nearly all board squares is probably more cumbersome than using a FEN-like notation for the entire board. That would require the property of the square to be encoded by a single character, though. But that character could encode an index in a table of the properties. Like
a: R; b: BvR; c: BsR; d: fRrRfrB; ...
acabcbaca/bdbcacbdb/...
(Just a move assignment I made up on the spot.) For irregular patterns like Smess there is no way to avoid specifying all squares explicitly, but regular cases one often encounters are homogeneous ranks, alternating squares on a rank, identical ranks or pairs of ranks. This is acually a problem that is very similar to coloring of the board, so the solution you use in the Diagram Designer for that should be applicable here.