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Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
The current code supports the format for indicating starting squares of the pieces, which it currently the only place where it interprets square coordinates. But if it was needed to process case labels referring to board squares, it could use the same shortcut.
I am not yet convinced enumerating the squares as case labels is the most convenient solution for the reader, though. To know how a piece moves he would have to search it amongst the case labels. Even if we adopt the convention to order these alphabetically, if there are many different square properties, he still would have to examine all the lines. But if the board is represented as a FEN he would know exactly where to find the square, as a FEN is basically an image.
Another problem with the case labels is that it is hard to find a shortcut for checkered patterns, which can be expected to be a common case. For Elk Chess it would be annoying if you have to write 32 case labels of the dark squares for the N move, and the other 32 case labels for the R move. The shorthand rules already used by the I.D. for the morph FENs make it easy to represent such patterns in a compact way.
But I guess that in the context of the I.D. we should above all ask ourselves the question "where will it be displayed, and what is the intended audience. The Diagram definition would normally be invisible to viewers of the page. And if this info would be displayed at all, it would not have to be displayed in the same format as in the Diagram definition.
I think the most convenient way to present this info to the reader is put the list of squares in parentheses behind the piece name in the piece table. Each move would have da different entry in this table. In the simplest implementation it would be the responsibility to write this list himself as part of the name. But it could also be added automatically, based on the square-property FEN. In principle it would be a comma-separated list of squares, but some regular patterns could be recognized (rectangles, which includes files and ranks, or chrckering), an special verbal descriptions could be shown for those (such as "on dark squares").
Of course the reverse could also be possible: the person creating the Diagram could write the list of squares, or the special phrases behind the piece names, and the Diagram script could recognize those, and apply the indicated moves accordingly.