Support for colored squares/arrows in PGN

Hello:

I believe the PGN editor doesn't support colored squares nor arrows comments, right? When I try to paste a PGN that contains this kind of comments I get either the [%cal] as a comment or an "Undefined" as part of the move.

Is this something you can implement? This is really useful when showcasing an analysis.

Thanks in advance.

A quick search showed that the main problem is that the original pgn standard didn't include standards for such things and that there is no body with the power to set out standards for new developments.

The current standard offers an easy to read format. Once comments and arrows are supported, can other things like embedded video be far behind?

Maybe it's better to keep pgn simple.

If you want to record a lecture, use video and video tools to add flashy arrows.

If other sites adopt a standard, chess.com will have to follow.

What is the status at other sites?

/ Anything new would have to offer support for the millions of games already in existing databases.

Well I know a couple of them that have already implemented it (don't wanna advertise anything here - I can tell you in private). Not sure there's any standard on that since, as you're correctly pointing out, a standard PGN does actually not support such things, but since the big CB monster is extensively using this feature (even when converting into PGN) I belive it would be highly appreciated by many people.

Regarding the legacy support, actually you're not changing anything of the current PGN format, but adding some extra parsing for the color-coding instead. Past games shouldn't be affected at all.

Thanks.

You could try pasting them into its own {} comment section, like so:

1 e4 { A text comment } { [%cal Ge1e3] }

Instead of:

1 e4 { A text comment [%cal Ge1e3] }