Variations can only appear after the main move in a position, and not before. We'd like to be able to group the games into rounds and tournaments, and to produce ebook-like documents with chapters and text between the games. ![]() In our new format, we're toying with the idea of using some kind of Markdown for comments, including support for things like images, videos and hyperlinks. No support for formatted text in comments – not even paragraphs. ![]() This makes it difficult to exchange computer annotated games between different pieces of software. Data like search depths and evaluations are included as textual comments, and the syntax of these comments vary from program to program. ![]() Various programs do support annotating games with engine analysis, but only using the standard PGN mechanisms of comments and recursive annotation variations. No support for including engine analysis in the game. A modern format should obviously support Unicode (in fact, many recent implementations of PGN do permit Unicode, even though this is technically breaking the standard). PGN is ASCII encoded, making it unsuitable for both player names and textual annotations in most of the world. Few users read PGN without the help of some kind of software anyway, and writing a working PGN parser is needlessly hard – even more so because in practice you also need to be able to parse all the subtly broken PGN that's produced by other programs that fail to implement the spec 100% correctly. PGN is designed to be somewhat humanly readable, at the expense of making it harder for computer software to parse and produce. Here are a few of the most significant weaknesses and limitations we've identified so far: The reason we bring up the work on the new format so far in advance is that we'd like to give the wider community a chance to share their thoughts about what they want to see in the new format, and what limitations in PGN annoy them the most. We don't expect the new format to be ready for external use before some time towards the end of the year (and that's an optimistic estimate). And finally, since we've got an awful lot of other work to do, we can't prioritize this task as much as I'd like. ![]() Along with the specification itself, we'd like to have some open source libraries for reading and manipulating games in the new format, as well as some friendly end-user software for producing and consuming content. It will take a while before we are ready to publish a specification, for a number of reasons: The format is still rapidly evolving, as we keep discovering new features that we need. We already use an early version of this new format internally. However, as groundbreaking as PGN was back when it was introduced (at a time where no open and widely implemented document format for chess games existed), time has moved on, and modern chess software struggles to work around the various limitations in PGN.Īt Play Magnus, we're working on a new chess game file format that we hope can replace PGN in the future, and that can also be used in many situations where the limitations in PGN makes it too awkward to use. Even today, it remains a fundamental part of computer chess infrastructure. Since it was introduced more than twenty years ago, Portable Game Notation has been by far the most widespread and portable format for exporting, importing and sharing annotated chess games in the software world.
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