“Writing” chess posts

As with any other type of writing or blogging every author’s best wish is to focus on content and spend minimum time on formatting and other unrelated things. Publishing chess related content is especially tricky.

The tools that chess authors have are fairly limited, and those available make you spend more time on practicing your drawing skills, rather than describing what you have originally envisioned to inform your audience about. You can use video chess blogging as a mean to discuss chess games, however, video blogging is not for everyone, and traditional writing remains a more convenient way to express yourself.

FEN chess notation explained

What is FEN?

FEN stands for Forsyth-Edwards Notation — chess notation used for displaying a chess position with simple text. It was designed by David Forsyth in the 19th century and later adapted to computing by Steven Edwards.

king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, pawn

Chess notations

P4 supports three different formats to describe a chess game. These are well known PGN and FEN standard notations as well as our own simplified format called chess. When you type the code of respective notation into your post, chess board diagrams will automatically appear.

You can use FEN notation to display a chess position on the chess board in the form of text characters.

Table | Chess pieces

Chess pieces

You can display chess pieces in text, like this rook . Chess pieces are abbreviated with letters K, Q, R, B, N, P, surrounded by colons :. For example, to insert white pieces use uppercase letters (:Q:for ) and for black pieces use lowercase letters (:q:for ).