MPchess

This package allows you to draw chess boards and positions. The appearance of the drawings is modern and largely inspired by what is offered by the excellent web site Lichess.org. Relying on METAPOST probably allows more graphic flexibility than the excellent LaTeX packages.

This package is in beta version, do not hesitate to report bugs, as well as requests for improvement.

Github

To allow for easier feedback and bug reporting, this repository has a mirror repository on github: https://github.com/chupinmaxime/mpchess

Installation

MPchess is on the ctan and can be installed via the package manager of your distribution https://www.ctan.org/pkg/mpchess.

With TeX live under Linux or MacOS

To install MPchess with TeX live, you will have to create the directory texmf directory in your home.

user $> mkdir ~/texmf

Then, you will have to place the .mp files in the ~/texmf/tex/metapost/mpchess/.

MPchess consists of 7 files METAPOST :

• mpchess.mp;
• mpchess-chessboard.mp;
• mpchess-pgn.mp;
• mpchess-fen.mp;
• mpchess-cburnett.mp;
• mpchess-pieces.mp;
• mpchess-skak.mp.

MPchess comes with a very basic chess font mpchess font.ttf that includes only 13 glyphs.

Once this is done, MPchess will be loaded with the classic

input mpchess

With MikTEX and Windows

These two systems are unknown to the author of MPchess, so we refer to their documentation to add local packages: http://docs.miktex.org/manual/localadditions.html

Dependencies

MPchess depends on the packages METAPOST: hatching and, if MPchess is not used with LuaLaTeX and luamplib, latexmp.

Documentation

• English documentation
• Documentation en français

Piece Set

A piece set has been designed for this package. It has also be added to lichess.org under the name of mpchess.

A dedicated git repository is available: https://plmlab.math.cnrs.fr/mchupin/mpchess-pieces and https://github.com/chupinmaxime/mpchess-pieces.

A TrueType font is available.

Contact

Maxime Chupin, notezik(at)gmail.com

Licenses

This projet is under LATEX Project Public License 1.3c but the file mpchess-cburnett is under GPLv2+ as asked by the author.