Werewolf wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 12:08 amFrom the image I posted above how do I select this empty book? I see no options to do so. Your instructions about what to do when I have the book I want make sense, but how to get to that book in the first place?
Sorry, my mistake. I said it was in the
Engine - Common Settings dialog, but that is only true for WinBoard 4.9 and later; in WinBoard 4.8 it is still in
Options - Common Engine:
The dialog stayed the same, but the main menus were re-organized a bit. The button indicated by the arrow is for browsing the book-file.
By the way, what is the latest version of winboard? The place I downloaded it from (Winboard forum?) suggested it was 4.8
That is indeed the latest official release of a complete binary package. I never released WinBoard 4.9 that way, because it was almost the same, the changes being almost exclusively in XBoard only. But displaying the book moves in SAN was apparently one of the changes that affected both XBoard and WinBoard.
But even newer than 4.9 is the development version; I did release that as a Windows binary (but without an installer, just the most necessary files in a zip archive), at
http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-AA.zip . I still regularly update this.
Note that WinBoard can also create a book from PGN, although for huge PGN it would probably not be as fast as SCID. You first load the PGN file through
File - Load (which gives you a standard file-browse dialog to selectthe PGN), and after it is loaded you can use
File - Save Games to Book to write the constructed book to the file that was specified in the Common Engine Settings. This is a cumulative process: if during the same session you then load another PGN file, and again use Save Games to Book, it adds those games to the book that was already in memory. (It will warn you that the book file already exists and will be overwritten, but as this is exactly what you want in this case you just select Save Games to Book again to let WinBoard know you really mean it.)
I think the latest version even allows you to filter the games in the PGN before you commit those to book: it only includes the games that are shown in the Game List window (which opens after loading a PGN with more than one game in it). You can limit that to a subset of the games through the
Options - Load Game dialog, applying Elo or date limits, or require the games to contain a given position or material balance and such. Through the filter field in the Game List window you can select on a certain a text string in the Game List (like "1-0" if you are only interested in white wins). The text displayed for each game in the Game List can be customized through the
View - Game List Tags dialog, where you can select what PGN tags should be shown there, and in which order.