Detailed description of Chess Assistant 7.1

There are many ways to export information from Chess Assistant.

You can do this by direct printing, by placing all sorts of information (from the game in PGN format to a bitmap of the board position) into the Windows clipboard, by exporting a game or set of games into RTF format for editing in your word processor, and, eventually, web pages with Javascripts. Each of these possibilities contains a number of options to customize the results according to your needs:

Printing: When printing games, you can control all of the layout features such as the number of columns to print the games, and enable functions such as use of extended formatting for complex variations. You can also customize the type of header presentation used so that it could look like the ones used in magazines, books, or the Informant, or you could create and save your own presentations. You can also print ECO style tables to look exactly like those used in the encyclopedia.
Clipboard: You can export just about anything into the Windows clipboard to paste where you want. The possibilities include:

The game in PGN (the whole game or its part from a specific point)
The analysis of the engine (mainline, all lines, etc.)
The position itself as an ASCII art board, as a bitmap, or as a bitmap including any colored commentary.
Other things such as the results of an engine test suite

RTF Exporting: An RTF (Rich Text Format) can be read in almost any Word Processor, and Chess Assistant allows you to export your games, ECO tables, and your tournament crosstables so that you could edit them to your liking or include them in a publication.
Web Exporting: You can also export your games, ECO tables, and tournament crosstables directly into a web page. If you are producing pages with the games, you can opt for plain notation, or make Chess Assistant produce web pages preserving all the game notation with resizable Javascript boards for your viewer’s convenience, and practical drop-down menus to switch between games (avoiding excessively large pages).

13. Statistics

Chess Assistant has a few special tools, which can’t be referred into any special category. It's the Statistics function, Prepare for your opponent, and the new Ratings and Norms.

Statistics allows you to see all the statistics of a dataset (a selection or the entire base) such as openings, players, openings of players, white pieces, black pieces, rounds of a tournament, etc. If you want to preserve the results you can export them to a text file.

14. Prepare for your opponent

With the Prepare for your opponent function you enter the name of your opponent, the color you are going to play, and the years to be included, Chess Assistant will create a Classifier with all the results of a player according to an opening, and color codes to identify quickly opening lines the player's been most successful with or had greater problems with. Double click on the folder of a particular opening line will call up the games for you to see.

15. Calculating a rating and Norms

With the new Ratings and Norms function, you can calculate a player’s rating change from an event or over a period of time, and keep track of any Norms (for both men and women’s titles) that have been completed or that are underway. As the results are placed afterwards into an especially created Classifier, you can edit them and include missing results or information at request.

16. Fonts, colors, pieces, backgrounds and DGT board

Chess Assistant 6 has a number of conveniences to give you more satisfaction, or in case of failure, to give you the means to make it as you want it. These are things like using your own fonts, changing colors, changing piece sets, backgrounds, using sound schemes, and finally using the DGT board.

If you own a DGT board, an electronic wooden auto-sensory board that you connect to your computer, you will be pleased to find that Chess Assistant 6 supports its use in a number of ways. You can obviously use it in your epic games against one of the engines, and you can also play over Internet when playing on ICC. Plus you can also use it to enter games into a database.

Although efforts are made to give you the most comfortable default settings, such as fonts, colors, pieces and other, everyone has his\her own preferences, and sometimes those preferences aren’t even included in the program. If you find you don’t like the set of fonts used, you can easily import other types and then configure them (even key for key if they are mapped differently). The same is true for the pieces and the board. You can import other pieces and images for the board, or design your own that you can use and share with others.

And if you are playing on ICC, then you can configure the message window style, as well as the sounds used at all the moments.

17. Usability Enhancements

17.1 New Test Mode

Game context menu: Test mode
CA 7 includes a new test mode that is accessible from the context menu in game view. This mode was developed with specific input from Maxim Blokh, the man responsible for the exercises and presentation in CT-ART. With this mode, you can set up exercises to be automatically presented as you go from game to game in a database. There are a large number of criteria that can be selected for determining which moves constitute a good exercise. This timesaving approach means that the user does not have to construct each exercise by hand. Conditions can also be specified for determining when exercises should be automatically presented (accessible through the Advanced... button).

Figure 8, the new test mode that can be used for opening preparation or chess exercises

17.2 Shortcut Key Assignments

Main menu: Tools->Main menu shortcuts, View shortcuts, etc
A new tree-like view of the keyboard shortcuts shows you the keys assigned to all the menu functions in CA. This function allows new users of the program to more readily adapt to it, or it allows experienced users to pick keystroke combinations that may be more intuitive for them. Additionally, you can also change the shortcut keys for any context-menu selection for a game. This would, for example, give you the option to change the keystroke combinations that are used for copying and pasting game scores from the windows clipboard.

17.3 New Piece Set

A new piece set is accessible through the "Advanced…" button in the View options dialog.

17.4 Tile Selected Windows

Main menu: Window->Tile selected
Since it is very easy to open many windows at once in CA, we have provided a tool for rearranging them. With the "Tile Selected" command, you can select which windows you want to see, and they will be tiled in a number of user selectable configurations.

17.5 Prepare for Opponent

Main menu: Advanced->Prepare for your opponent
This function was available in CA 6, but we have added many enhancements to it for version 7. And while this function is normally used to point out weaknesses (and strengths) of a player's repertoire, it can also be applied to your own games as well.

There is now an easier way to see good and bad moves, and an option to show all variations played by that individual in ECO and move-tree format. Clicking on a specific variation in ECO-mode transports you to set of games from that variation. Folder views in ECO mode are also provided for your convenience.
In the figure below, we have asked CA 7 to analyze Judit Polgar's repertoire. Here we see that she generally scores pretty well with the King's Indian when playing black. However, the E74 variation seems to be problematic for her. Double-clicking on E74 displays a dataset of her games from this variation.

Figure 9, preparing to play Judit Polgar

17.6 Background Processing

Many search, database, and analysis functions now have a new progress indicator, and can be sent to the background. When the background button is clicked, the program will reside in the windows tray. An animated icon shows percent completion for the current operation. Operations can be paused as well, if you wish to free the processor for other calculations.

17.7 Scripting

Main menu: Tree->Scripts->Manager…
CA 7 also has a number of new scripting capabilities. CA 6 allowed the user to script various tree functions. Now you also have the option to script database operations too. This allows very time-intensive tasks to be deferred, via the included built-in scheduler, which is also new for this version.