On Tue, 25 May 2004 10:08:26 -0700, John Hudson wrote: > > Andrew C. West wrote: > > > I've never quite worked out what purpose U+2616 [WHITE SHOGI PIECE] and U+2617 > > [BLACK SHOGI PIECE] are intended for. > > > The standard game of shogi (Japanese Chess) has 20 uncoloured tiles on each > > side, with a kanji inscription giving the piece's name on each tile. > > In discussions of shogi games, one player is conventionally called 'Black' and > the other 'White', but as you note this has nothing to do with the colour of the pieces. I > would like to know what the presumed purpose of U+2616 and U+2617 is. If it is indeed > to be able to represent shogi game pieces, then the glyph representation shown in the > Unicode charts might be changed: both pieces should be white in colour, but facing in > opposite directions. >
If any application did want to use U+2616 and U+2617 for representing actual shogi pieces, the glyphs would have to have a blank foreground (sorry James) and one of them would have to be inverted as John suggests. But then the application would have to resize the glyph as appropriate for each piece (more important pieces have larger sized tiles), and overlay the appropriate Kanji or kana inscription (at the appropriate font size), and if the inscription was to overlay the inverted shogi glyph the inscription would also have to be rotated 180 degrees. Clearly using plain images would be far far simpler, and so I cannot believe that U+2616 and U+2617 were intended to be used like this. My suspicion is that U+2616 and U+2617 are intended to be used in shogi notation to indicate which side a particular move belongs to, and are not intended to be used to actually represent specific shogi pieces. There is no real need to do so anyway. Just as in Western Chess notation, which uses "K", "N", "B", etc. to represent the king, knight and bishop (not U+2654..265F), in shogi notation the pieces are represented by their Japanese names not picures of the pieces. So U+2616 and U+2617 *may* be used something like this : U+2616 : Gold to e4. U+2617 : Silver to f5. > > Each side's > > 20 tiles are identical (differentiated by orientation not by colour) except for > > the "general". > > Not so. Both sides has four generals: two 'gold' and two 'silver'. The gold and > silver generals differ from each other, but each side's pieces are entirely identical. > By "general" I meant the piece that corresponds to the king in Western Chess (in xiangqi and shogi the king is a general), not the gold and silver generals (which correspond to the "Mandarin" in xiangqi). In my set, at least, one of the tiles representing this piece is inscribed "Prince General" 王将 <738B, 5C06> (�-sh� ?) whilst the other tile is inscribed "Jade General" 玉将 <7389, 5C06> (gyoku-sh� ?), with a single dot differentiating the pieces. However, I do not know if this is universal or not. What does your set have ? > By the way, if any Unicoders play shogi, I could bring my travel set next time I > come to the conference. I have played the odd game in the past ... and given my playing style, odd is the operative word. Andrew
