Using LaTeX with Scid

LaTeX is an extension to TeX, a popular typesetting package that is widely used on Unix operating systems.

Scid can save games and opening reports to files in LaTeX format, but to use these files you need the LaTeX package of chess fonts (known as "chess12" since the last version was 1.2, or just "chess") created by Piet Tutelaers. With this package, Scid can include chess diagrams and figurine notation of moves in the LaTeX files it produces. You can see examples on the Scid home page.

Depending on your LaTeX distribution, you may already have this package installed. If not, you will have to install it before you can use LaTeX on the files Scid saves.

Downloading and installing the chess package

There is an RPM package of the LaTeX chess font available for SuSE-Linux, which may work fine for other distributions of Linux (such as RedHat) as well---but I have never tried it. Click here for more information on the RPM.

As a last resort for people who cannot get the chess font package installed any other way, I have made available below a tar archive of the package as I use it. It should (hopefully!) work on most systems where dvips is the standard tool used to produce PostScript files from DVI files.

Download

chess12.tar.gz

and extract it to a directory where you keep LaTeX files. For example, to have the chess package in ~/latex/chess12 (as I have), extract it in your ~/latex directory.

After downloading and extracting chess12.tar.gz, you will need to set up some environment variables so the programs latex, xdvi and dvips know where to find the chess font files. This part varies depending on (a) the directory where you extracted the package, and (b) your default shell.

I use tcsh and have the following lines in my ~/.environment file:

    setenv CHESSFONT "${HOME}/latex/chess12"
    setenv TEXINPUTS "${CHESSFONT}/inputs:"
    setenv TEXFONTS  "${CHESSFONT}/fonts:"
    setenv XDVIFONTS "${CHESSFONT}/pkfonts:"
    setenv MFINPUTS  "${CHESSFONT}/mf:"
    setenv PKFONTS   "${CHESSFONT}/pkfonts:"

However, people who use a shell with sh-style variable setting (such as bash) will probably need something like the following in their ~/.profile file:

    CHESSFONT="${HOME}/latex/chess12"
    TEXINPUTS="${CHESSFONT}/inputs:"
    TEXFONTS="${CHESSFONT}/fonts:"
    XDVIFONTS="${CHESSFONT}/pkfonts:"
    MFINPUTS="${CHESSFONT}/mf:"
    PKFONTS="${CHESSFONT}/pkfonts:"
    export CHESSFONT TEXINPUTS TEXFONTS XDVIFONTS MFINPUTS PKFONTS

Good luck using LaTeX with Scid! Hopefully, this page was useful. If you have any suggestions for improving it, email me. If you are unable to install the LaTeX chess font and cannot make progress, you can email me for help, but I am not a LaTeX guru and will probably not be able to provide much more help than this page.

Shane Hudson
January 2001