It has always annoyed me that there is no quick and easy way to include a simple diagram in comments, as other Chess forums typically have. You would either have to upload something, or go to the Diagram Designer page to create a HTML image tag, and copy-paste that into your comment after switching it to source code (or know enough to isolate the URL from the IMG tag, and use that in the image-insertion dialog of the CkEditor in WYSIWIG mode). On Talkchess.com I only have to type a FEN of the position in the text of a posting, and sandwich it between [ fen][ /fen] tags.
It would be rather easy to also provide such a facility here. Just let the listcomment.php script recognize the [ fen] tags in the text of the comment, and replace it by an IMG tag referring to a FEN-to-diagram script, passing the latter the enclosed FEN as an argument. During storage in the database, or when editing, the position would retain its text form, so this doesn't interfere with anything.
I have made an adapted version of the listcomment.php script (just adding two lines to the latter) that invokes the Diagram Designer for inserting the image. When you would view this page with comments through that modified script (by replacing 'list' by 'hgm' in the address bar of the browser) the following line would show up as a diagram:
The current version of the Diagram Designer is not really ideal for this, as it is not able to derive the board width from the FEN, but needs a separate parameter for that (as a test further down the comment page shows). It also omits the last rank of the FEN when it is not complete. (The latter seems a bug, as it has no problem completing other ranks if it thinks these are too short?)
It has always annoyed me that there is no quick and easy way to include a simple diagram in comments, as other Chess forums typically have. You would either have to upload something, or go to the Diagram Designer page to create a HTML image tag, and copy-paste that into your comment after switching it to source code (or know enough to isolate the URL from the IMG tag, and use that in the image-insertion dialog of the CkEditor in WYSIWIG mode). On Talkchess.com I only have to type a FEN of the position in the text of a posting, and sandwich it between [ fen][ /fen] tags.
It would be rather easy to also provide such a facility here. Just let the listcomment.php script recognize the [ fen] tags in the text of the comment, and replace it by an IMG tag referring to a FEN-to-diagram script, passing the latter the enclosed FEN as an argument. During storage in the database, or when editing, the position would retain its text form, so this doesn't interfere with anything.
I have made an adapted version of the listcomment.php script (just adding two lines to the latter) that invokes the Diagram Designer for inserting the image. When you would view this page with comments through that modified script (by replacing 'list' by 'hgm' in the address bar of the browser) the following line would show up as a diagram:
The current version of the Diagram Designer is not really ideal for this, as it is not able to derive the board width from the FEN, but needs a separate parameter for that (as a test further down the comment page shows). It also omits the last rank of the FEN when it is not complete. (The latter seems a bug, as it has no problem completing other ranks if it thinks these are too short?)