For the FENoPhobic

For those who want to record an interesting position form a book or a webpage,

FEN is a solution but not the only one. Most chess software ( free or otherwise )  have the option of setting up positions. Among them, I find the one from Lucas Chess (Version 7.08 ), which can be freely downloaded , most helpful. Here is how you use the setup function in this software.

(1) Tools> Create Your own game

(2) Config > Start position

(3) If the position is not far from the beginning, you can just drag and drop the required pieces to set up . To remove a piece, right click on the square.

For middlegames and endgames, where fewer pieces remain, try clearing the board first. On a square awaiting input, right click to get the listbox of pieces and get the piece you want ( This feature speeds up the input process by light years. )  After that, if you want to have more of this piece, e.g. 3 other pawns, drag and drop

(4) Now check the turn to move: Black or White and recheck if you have all the pieces in the right place. Now choose Copy FEN position   and then paste it in a doc or txt file, adding the additonal info about players etc.   Later, you can paste the FEN notation back into your favourite software to begin your analysis.

 Alternatively, you can accept the position first by clicking on the Accept button, which will bring you to a larger board. Now you can save the position as a pks file in the pieces folder of Lucas Chess. Later, you can retrieve the position after following step(1) and then choose the open option and then choose the corresponding pks file.

A small tip: You can input new positions by retrieving existing pks files (preferably roughly classified according to the number of pieces remaining on the board , e.g. 20 pieces, 10 pieces etc ) and then follow step(2) to edit it. This will save you eons of time if you need to input tens or even hundreds of game positions.