Portable Draughts Notation is the standard computer-processable format for recording draughts games. This format is derived from Portable Game Notation, which is the standard chess format. PDN files are text files which must contain Tag Pairs and Movetext for each game.
Tag Pairs
Tag pairs begin with "". There must be a newline after each tag. Tag names are case-sensitive. PDN data for archival storage is required to provide 7 tags. ;Event: the name of the tournament or match event ;Site: the location of the event. This is in "City, Region COUNTRY" format, where COUNTRY is the 3-letter International Olympic Committee code for the country. An example is "New York City, NY USA". ;Date: the starting date of the game, in YYYY.MM.DD form. "??" are used for unknown values ;Round: the playing round ordinal of the game ;White: the player of the White pieces, in "last name, first name" format ;Black: the player of the Black pieces, same format as White ;Result: the result of the game. This can only have four possible values: "1-0", "0-1", "1/2-1/2", or "*" ;FEN: the initial position of the checkers board. This is used to record partial games. It is also necessary for some draughts variants where the initial position is not always the same as traditional checkers. If a FEN tag is used, a separate tag pair "SetUp" must also appear and be have its value set to "1". A position can be stored by the FEN tag:
:...]:...]"] ;Turn: the side to move, B for Black, W for White ;Color 1 and Color 2: the color for the Square numbers that follow B for Black, W, and the sequence is unimportant. ;K: optional before square number, indicates the piece on that square is a king, otherwise it is a man. ;Square number: indicates the square number occupied by a piece. The square number must be at least a "1". On an 8×8 board, it has a range from 1-32. These are comma separated, and the sequence is unimportant. Examples:
Movetext
Movetext contains the actual moves for the game. Moves begin with the source square number, then a "-" or "x", finally destination square number. Jumps must be specified by each square that would be jumped, or two squares only. The end of the game must contain the 4 standard result codes: "1-0", "1/2-1/2" "0-1", and "*". The codes must be the same as the Result tag pair. An annotator who wishes to suggest alternative moves to those actually played in the game may insert variations enclosed in parentheses.
Comments may be added by either a ";". Comments do not nest.
Variants
PDN can be used in a wide variety of draughts variants synthesized with different board sizes. For example, PDN can represent 8×8 and 10×10 boards. It can represent unmatched board sizes by specifying unequivalent values in the Board-width and the Board-height headers. It can include the optional GameType tag to differentiate between different variants. Type-number: this is one of the following type-numbers: 0: Chess 1: Chinese chess 2-19: future chess expansion 20: 10x10 draughts 21: English draughts 22: Italian draughts 23: American pool draughts 24: Spanish pool draughts 25: Russian draughts 26: Brazilian 8x8 draughts 27: Canadian 12x12 draughts 28: Portuguese draughts 29: Czech draughts 30: Turkish draughts 31: Thai draughts 40: Frisian draughts 41: Spantsiretti 32-39, 42-49: Future draughts expansion 50: Othello 51.. Future expansion. ;Start-color: B for Black, W for White ;Board-width: board width ;Board-height: board height ;Notation:
A - alpha/numeric like chess
N - numeric like draughts
S - SAN - short-form chess notation. Then follows a number 0-4 telling where square A1 or 1 is for the side who starts the game, 0 = Bottom left, 1=Bottom right, 2=Top left, 3=Top right.
