Software that Displays Selected Chess Problems ?

Android or Windows, free or commercial.

    My favorite chess app is iChess , which displays problems to be solved on my Android

    tablet.  However almost half the problems in its various files are cooked.

I have my own collection of hundreds of problems/ FEN positions that I'd like to display.

These are selected and not cooks.

I put some carefully into a pgn file, meeting all the standards of this format. It is divided

into tag pairs & movetext. The tags include the Seven Tag Roster followed by 

[SetUp "1"] and then [FEN "rnb... w - - 0 29"] or whatever the position requires.

This file will not be displayed by any software I've tried.

    iChess recognizes and opens the file , may show a few problems but usually

crashes.  I emailed Asim Pererra asking about the format of his files, but no answer.

    On Windows my WinBoard , HiArcs and Shredder all refuse to display anything, 

usually saying "illegal move" .

    Does anyone know the format of the files used by iChess ?   Is there any software

that will display a pgn file containing a FEN tag , either as a problem query or simply

the continuation of a game fragment ?   Thanks for your kind assistance.

little_ernie    dav.lemper@gmail.com

It looks to me like you're creating the PGN tags correctly. I would expect the PGN file to be read correctly by Arena, Shredder, and Scid/Scid vs. PC. Also, I'd be surprised if Winboard or Hiarcs couldn't also read it.

Did you get any program to read your PGN file? I would be suspicious that something might be wrong with your PGN file.

BTW, I use Fred Mellender's YATT program to practice tactics. It's only on the Windows platform. It converts PGN files to its own YATT format for use.

https://sites.google.com/site/fredm/

Can you post one of the PGNs that the software can't read?  Maybe there's some irregularities that the first software was able to ignore and not the other software.

PGN is designed to be human readable/editable so the softwrae input is supposed to be lenient -- however, there was no specification on what is lenient.

Since my initial post I discovered a major part of the problem : different Unicode characters for quotation marks.

All my handling of pgn files has been with a text editor Notepad++ .  Unfortunately I decided to

print a list of the problems I assembled into the file to be transferred to the tablet. This list was

edited and printed from Open Office Writer, then saved and then read back into Notepad++.

While repeatedly examining this on the Notepad screen I noted some quotation marks were curved

and others 'neutral'.  Notepad++ uses Unicode U+0022 neutral ( vertical ) quotation marks while

Open Office puts in U+201C ( left double quotation marks ) and U+201D ( right double ). 

I changed all these to the Notepad++ 'neutral' marks and the file was handled flawlessly by all three

chess programs, WinBoard, Shredder and HiArcs.  They recognize the SetUp and step through the

remaining moves. 

Transferring the pgn file to the tablet is easy and iChess does much better with the vertical marks, but

still has serious problems. It will display many but still chokes on some, displaying the normal startup

position instead of the FEN. Once this happens, the program is shot and closes with any further attempts.  It is quite finicky and chokes on any extra space, ambiguous move, or whatever, while the

Windows programs handle the file fine.  I examined and fine-tuned the file many times the past 48 hours but still can't find one that iChess handles completely.

Appreciate the help of EscherehcsE and mgx9600 . You are both correct : there was something wrong

with the pgn file.  There's nothing more I can do with iChess unless I root the tablet and examine directly its pgn files.     Regards,     little_ernie