Chess PGN to Gif

Purpose: Convert a chess game given in PGN format to a GIF file using some intermediate python libraries. This made for a fun afternoon project on which I can keep iterating and learn new things. It also showcases the power of Python as a glue language!

Dedicated to my father a.k.a "baba" from whom I learned the basics of chess :)

Dependencies

The scripts have fairly minimal setup requirements. The project was last tested with the following packages on Ubuntu 20.04. Note: not tested with other operating systems!

• Python 3.11
• python-chess 1.9.4
• imageio 2.26.0

See the requirements.txt to test the code out and environment.yml for setting up a dev environment to hack the code.

Usage

chess_gif.py is the main python file to use for creating the gif. Use as:

$ python chess_gif.py -d DURATION -i INPUT -o OUTPUT

• DURATION: time given to each frame in the output gif.
• INPUT: path for .pgn file for the chess game.
• OUTPUT desired path for output .gif.

The board and its moves are represented as an 'ASCII art' image. text_to_img.py is an intermediate helper script to create image representation of a text file.

To Do

No guarantees as to when I'll actually sit down

• Cleanup the repo, update readme, requirements and todo.
• Make the images.append() warning from imageio disappear by updating the code
• Can we avoid writing tmp files and images and instead keep everything in memory?
• Write code for proper unit tests. For now, tests/ just contains not so pretty jupyter notebooks left over from >4 years ago!
• SVG output files for images.
• Custom images for the board pieces instead of letters (i.e more pretty output!)
• Other output formats: interactive webpage using javascript where one can move forward or backward with the moves.
  • Custom options for the output like resolution, quality, etc...
• Host a web frontend where user will upload .pgn file and you produce required output with option to save it?