Arena PGNS

Hi,

When I save a pgn in Arena and then try to copy it into the "Insert position or game" feature it doesn't work.  Anyone know a way to fix this problem?

Sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to do. As far as I know, there's no "Insert position or game" command in Arena. Could you list the exact steps you're taking?

Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my original post.  What I meant is that I have saved a pgn in Arena, and now I want to post it on chess.com forums.  The problem is that when I try to copy the pgn into the "Insert position or game" feature on chess.com only the first few moves come up in the board that i insert, I haven't been able to figure out any way to fix this - does Arena not format pgns the right way to use on chess.com?  This is quite frustrating for me since I do my post game analysis in Arena and it means I can't post it on the site.

That is indeed strange, maybe there is some formatting problem since it seems to work partially for you.

When you say only the first few moves work for you, is that "few" variable or does it always stop working after the exact same number of moves ?

I can't remember ever having a problem uploading Arena PGNs to Chess.com. (I just now tried one in preview mode and it worked OK.)

There IS a potential problem going the other way, though. I've noticed sometimes that if I copy a game PGN from Chess.com, it will include a FEN tag, even if the game starts from the original starting position. If the game does NOT start from the original starting position, Arena will happily accept the PGN with no problems. However, if the game starts from the original starting position and there's a FEN tag in the PGN, Arena will choke on the PGN and not display anything. In this case, you have to remove the FEN tag (and the associated [SetUp "1"] tag) before pasting the PGN into Arena.

@Dirty_Sandbagger, I'm not sure I'll try and post a couple in this thread to show what I mean.

Ok they seem to stop when it gets to a subvariation...I guess I can try to change the formatting somehow?

Yeah, you're right, it's the variations that are causing the problem. I guess I never uploaded any PGNs with variations.

OK, I think I found the problem. Unfortunately, I doubt that there's a permanent fix, so I guess we'll have to make edits every time we post an Arena PGN with variations.

Here's the problem - There will be a Black move either at the beginning of every variation, or as the first move after a variation ends. Before that Black move, there is a series of periods. Chess.com looks for three consecutive periods, but Arena only supplies two consecutive periods. All you have to do is add another period to the Arena PGN so that there are three consecutive periods for that Black move.

Here's an example of the Black move coming after the end of the variation:

Snippet from broken Arena PGN:

15. Qf3 (15. Qg3 Bd7 16. Qf3 Bc6) 15. .. Nc6 16. Bg5

Snippet of fixed Arena PGN:

15. Qf3 (15. Qg3 Bd7 16. Qf3 Bc6) 15. ... Nc6 16. Bg5

Alternately, I think this fix also works:

15. Qf3 (15. Qg3 Bd7 16. Qf3 Bc6) 15... Nc6 16. Bg5

And here's an example of the Black move coming at the beginning of the variation:

Snippet from broken Arena PGN:

14. h4 h5 (14. .. Rg8 15. Qf3 h5 16. Qg3) 15. Qf3

Snippet of fixed Arena PGN:

14. h4 h5 (14. ... Rg8 15. Qf3 h5 16. Qg3) 15. Qf3

By the way, I found that Scid vs. PC supplies three consecutive periods, so it doesn't have the problem that Arena has. I didn't check any other GUIs to see if Arena was the only one with the problem.

Wow thankyou so much for figuring this out, doing the editing is going to be annoying but at least I know now.  Thanks again!

Just checking the fix...

Perfect

You're welcome. Yeah, I wasn't too happy to learn of this problem. Looks like it may be just one more Arena bug to deal with.

I found the easiest work around was to open the pgns in SCID then save them to a new file.