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I'm not convinced. Why would you read the file in a text editor instead of loading it into ChessBase or a similar program?
by fasterik 4y ago
I'm not convinced. Why would you read the file in a text editor instead of loading it into ChessBase or a similar program?
- Bjartr 4y agoMaybe they can read the game faster than it would play on screen? Like the difference between a video and its transcript?
- fasterik 4y agoYou can still read the notation on screen in ChessBase. It also makes navigating through the games and searching for specific players and opening lines much easier.
- apetresc 4y agoOh, you're not wrong. I didn't mean to imply that chess players read PGN files cold. They definitely load it into Chessbase for actual use. But I'm just saying it's a nice QoL feature to be able to paste a PGN into an e-mail or load it up in your text editor and just be able to, at a glance, get info like who the players were, how the game ended, how long it was, etc. Often that's the thing you need to decide if this is a file you want to load into Chessbase in the first place. It's not a killer feature or critical use-case, but it is good ergonomics and you're not going to supplant PGN with some binary encoding just because it's a few kilobytes smaller because of it.