🔥 CREATE Amazing Chess Diagrams with DiagTransfer | Chess Chats #5
#chesschats #software #chessdiagrams
I've recently started writing my next book (it'll be on the best chess opening attacks in the Romantic style) and one of the things I learnt from my first book, is that I needed a better way to insert chess diagrams. In the first book, all diagrams were in colour and inserted as (raster) images at between 300-600 dpi. As my book was designed to be accessible to beginners, I usually showed lines move-by-move, which meant, a lot of diagrams. There were two problems:
- This resulted in the master version of the document to be massive in size, which was difficult to handle in publishing as various upload portals either had size limits, or were unreliable with files larger than 500 Mb.
- The second issue was that raster image reproduction for very fine details (e.g., a chess diagram) was suboptimal with less expensive print options, regardless of the dpi of the original image. Fine details would be a little soft and blurred, compared to, for instance, text. This made choosing higher quality paper and print options a necessity, which increases the unit production cost (and thus price) of the book.
This was okay with 50+2 Chess Quick Wins as it was designed with visual art in mind and published in a larger trim size (8.5" x 11") format. However, my second book will use a more typical size (6" x 9") and I'm planning on publishing the standard edition as a paperback in black and white print. As I'm expecting the page count will be probably around 300-500, this format will keep down the cost - colour prints of books at that page length is relatively expensive. I needed an alternative to using images for the diagrams!
After a bit of reading and research, I identified the solution: using special chess fonts to create the board diagrams in a word processor like Microsoft Word. The chess fonts were easy to find (and were free), but I needed a way to automate making the diagram. It seemed that among its many functions, ChessBase can do it, but I was loathe to spend hundreds of euros for this single use case! There were some very old Office 97 era macros that could process an inputted FEN into a diagram, but these don't really work with modern Word in 2024.
However, I eventually found my solution - a free piece of software called DiagTransfer (v. 4.3) by Alain Blaisot, which is available on his website: http://alain.blaisot.free.fr/DiagTransfer/English/home.htm
The software can be downloaded directly from the above link. However, although the installation file size is small (2.8 Mb), the website is very slow. A mirror of the installation files on Dropbox.
The software runs on Windows, and it comes with its own chess fonts, but can use a range of others. The website link above includes a link to where more free chess fonts can be used. My favourite is Chess Merida.
DiagTransfer has more features than I need, but in essence, you can use it as a board editor including some annotations. To set up a position, you can do it manually, or import a PGN. This is very handy as you then have quick access to all the positions in a line/game, and if the PGN was originally exported from a database or game service, then the risk of a transcription error is effectively eliminated.
The board position can then be copied as either an image, or what I needed, in RTF (rich text format); as a block of specially formatted characters in the correct chess font representing the board position that can then be easily pasted into Word!
If you use this to construct board diagrams and intend to share the electronic document, make sure you choose the option to embed used fonts in Word, or when exporting to a PDF.
Enjoy!
