chessplot 1.4

Package for visualising chess games

Chessplot

Introduction

chessplot is a library for producing visualisations of chess games by parsing and plotting .pgn files (Portable Game Notation).

It can produce either an animated .gif of a game or a .pdf with a single page per move.

Installation

Using PyPi:

The easiest way to install chessplot is using Pypi.

To do this, first ensure that you have pip installed then run:

pip install chessplot

Usage:

The core of chessplot is the ChessPlot class. A ChessPlot can be created using a valid path to a .pgn file of a chess game. The game can then be visualised by calling the to_gif, to_pdf, or to_png methods of the ChessPlot class.

For example:

from chessplot import ChessPlot
  
plot = ChessPlot(pgn="mypgnfile.pgn")

plot.to_gif(save_path="mynewgif.gif")

This code will read and parse the given .pgn file mypgnfile.pgn, create a visualisation of the game, and then save the output as a .gif to the file mynewgif.gif.

If a save_path is not provided, a path will be generated using the path of the inputted .pgn file.

For example, creating an instance of ChessPlot with the file mypgnfile.pgn and calling the to_gif method would cause a file to be saved to the path mypgnfile.gif.

Customising plots

Plots can be customised in a number of ways using the following settings:

• plot_size: This determines the width of the generated plot in millimeters
• board_only: Toggles the plot header to allow for plots of just the board
• display_notation: Toggles move notation on plots
• flip_perspective: Toggles the perspective of the board from white to black

In addition, when generating .gif or .pdf files, the start and end frames can be specified using the start_frame and end_frame parameters.

For example:

from chessplot import ChessPlot

plot = ChessPlot(pgn="myfile.pgn")

plot.to_gif(
    plot_size=1000,
    board_only=True,
    display_notation=True,
    flip_perspective=True,
    start_frame=10,
    end_frame=15
)