goboards – supplementary documentation

Firstly, many thanks to Stijn van Dongen for providing goboards – a flexible package for creating high-quality printable Go boards. Most of the documentation for the program is within a Perl script. However, all of the PostScript files that it produces also contain much of the same documentation. The official goboards web page provides links to popular downloads of ready-made Go boards, in PostScript (compressed with gzip), and PDF format; introduces the package in general; and outlines use of the Perl script. This document is intended as a supplement to the official goboards documentation – we discuss more peripheral issues such as:

Unusual ways of using the Go boards.
Appropriate board dimensions for differnt kinds of stones
Further use of board backgrounds (including customized images)
Double-sided printing
Anything else that does not belong on the official web page.

The border between the official documentation, and this page is not fixed, and is somewhat porous – items may occasionally be duplicated, or may move in either direction!

When using the package, your main choices for using/creating Go boards are, in approximate order of effort needed by you:

Download a ready-made PDF file: simple; small file; lower-res image; not configurable.
Download a ready-made PostScript file: simple, but you will need to have a PostScript viewer (e.g. GSview, with the associated GhostScript program); backgrounds give much larger files; high-res background image; very configurable, so ...
... hand-edit the PostScript, using your favourite text-editor (notepad/ whatever). This lets you make various changes (there are detailed notes within the PostScript file, itself) – e.g. insert your own customized text for advertizing; make the board larger, for Chinese stones; change the background colour, or ...
... maybe join together (with a text-editor) the PostScript files for two boards, to create a file suitable for back-to-back printing – more details in the PostScript file, and/or Perl script – this is discussed below.
If you have the scripting language Perl available on your machine, then use the gb-TEMPLATE script, simultaneously to create sets of PostScript and PDF files. The Perl script lets you customize all options via the command line. Perl binaries are freely available for installion on Windows, MacOS/X, Linux via perl.com.

Postscript and PDF

Viewers for Adobe PDF files are easily to install, are freely available from Adobe.com, and are often already installed. PostScript viewers (e.g. GSview, and associated Ghostscript) are also freely available, though less often pre-installed.

The supplied PostScript and PDF files were created using a master Perl script which is well-commented internally. The PostScript files themselves(e.g. wood-effect boards) can be easily edited. They are well structured and are easily further customized. Please note that some ready-made PDF files might not be of the highest quality. If possible, work from the PostScript files.

For files with grain backgrounds, the supplied PostScript and PDF files differ in quality. The PostScript files contain a high-resolution background. The PDF files are much smaller, and have much lower resolution backgrounds. This is because free tools such as pdfwrite (part of GSview/GhostScript), and pstopdf (similar parentage) offer little choice. If you have the commercial software Adobe Acrobat (from Adobe), you can use non-default settings which will let you retain the high quality when converting from PostScript to PDF.

Some common board sizes, and matching paper sizes

The gsboard package lets you choose arbitrary board dimensions (for stones of any size). Furthermore, you can (attempt to) print these on any paper size (A4/ A3/ A2/ A1/ [A0]). Obviously you should choose a paper size that is big enough.

If you want to do double-sided printing then you will usually choose to print both boards on a page of the same size. You may therefore choose a size that is larger than necessary for the smaller board.

Here we show possible appropriate choices for some "standard" board sizes, and stone sizes. Of course, it might be sensible to print a reduced-size 19x19 board on A4 paper, if your "stones" were only 1cm in diameter!

Board	Paper Size					Stone Size
Board	A4	A3	A2	A1	[A0]	Stone Size
9	X	X	X	X	[X]	Japanese/Korean
9		X	X	X	[X]	Chinese
13		X	X	X	[X]	Japanese/Korean
13			X	X	[X]	Chinese
19				X	[X]	— Any —

Note; it may be difficult/expensive to print on larger paper sizes (A2/ A1/ [A0]). An alternative is to use "poster printing" tools. These are usually available, as standard, in printer drivers – even for cheap-and-cheerful inkjet printers. Using this, you might end up with several sheets of A4 (say) which will need to be glued together.

Stone sizes, and board dimensions

Web sources suggest that:

for Japanese stones (approx 22 mm diameter), the grid should be 22.33 mm x 23.92 mm, with a border that is half of each of these.
for Chinese stones (approx 23 mm diameter), the grid should be 23.33 mm x 24.22 mm

The page on Sensei's Library says that (for Japanese stones) the separations should be 22.0 mm and 23.7 mm. Later, talking about Chinese boards, the same page says:
"The grid itself is 420 mm wide by 436 mm long (cells are 23.33 mm by 24.22 mm) These are designed for Chinese-style stones (flat on one side, 23 mm diameter), ... "
We can therefore see why Chinese stones (approx 23 mm diameter) are generally too big for Japanese boards (approx 22 mm on short side)!

It is worth noting that the ratio of the grid separations for the Chinese board described above is only 1.0381, compared with the more pronounced 1.07/1.08 found below for Japanese-style boards.

A posting on rec.games.go in 1994 from Robert Seymour says that (for ING tournaments) the separation dimensions should be 22.1 mm x 23.6 mm

A r.g.g. posting from Charles Rich in 2002 shows some observed variability:


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Goban source                 Hborder  Vborder  H grid  V grid   Ratio
---------------------------- -------  -------  ------  ------  ------
Seattle Go Center, board #1     0.90     1.20   39.50   42.95  1.0873
Seattle Go Center, board #2     1.55     1.55   38.54   42.12  1.0930
Seattle Go Center, board #3     1.25     1.50   39.50   42.55  1.0772
Yutopian spruce board (Korean)  1.75     1.90   39.33   42.00  1.0679
Nihon Kiin (ideal spec)         1.12     1.20   40.19   43.06  1.0714
Roy Schmidt (rec.games.go)      1.35     1.35   39.72   42.75  1.0763
Lasker (27/32" x 29/32" cell)                   38.58   41.43  1.0741
Sensei's Library                1.38     1.38   39.60   42.66  1.0773
          (22mm x 23.7mm cell)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Average ratio:                                                 1.0781
Average (after casting out the two outliers):                  1.0773
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Here the "H grid" and "V grid" are the measurements in cms over a whole 19x19 board – to get the separation (of the centres) of the lines, divide these numbers by 18.

Back-to-back/duplex Printing

There are 3 different ways to get 2-sided boards:

The suggested way: create a single file, with 2 board images, and print double-sided on a printer that supports this. There is little scope for error. Some examples (both PDF and PostScript) are provided on the official website. Note that some printers will not support duplex on the thicker cards.
Print a single image on one side. Somehow, work out how to put the paper back in the feed tray in the correct orientation (there are only 4 possible ways!), and then print the other image on the reverse side.
Print each board on a separate sheet of paper/card. Glue them together, carefully.

Using the first method, you will want to obtain/create 2 PostScript files, and then join them together using a text-editor. If you are printing background images, then (probably) choose the same /bgsize, and /clipsize for both sides. You should have crop marks (/cropdx, and /cropdy) on the larger side only. It is difficult to ensure that the printing on one side registers exactly with the other side – they may differ by up to 5mm (approximately 0.25 /xunit, if your /xunit is 20mm). Therefore choose/edit values (of /clipsize, /gbsize, /cropdx/, and /cropdy) in the PostScript source file such that, say:
/clipsize - 0.25 ≥ /gbsize - 1 + (2 * max(/cropdx, /cropdy))

When joining together 2 PostScript files you should remove the first 10 lines from your second PostScript file, before adding it to the end of the first one. The lines to be removed will look something like:

%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%DocumentMedia: A3 842 1190 0 () ()
%%EndComments

%%BeginSetup
%%BeginFeature: *PageSize A3
<< /PageSize [842 1190] /ImagingBBox null >> setpagedevice
%%EndFeature

%%EndSetup

Choice of media, and their uses

Some choices of media are:

print on paper/card, and use as is;
print on paper/card and encapsulate (can be up to A0, at a price!);
print on paper/card laminate – maybe less durable than encapsulation;
print on waterproof paper (suggested by Richard Mullens). Maybe this will cause problems with some printers;
print on paper, and glue to wood, or high density foam.
print direct onto (overhead) transparency, use with dry-wipe/washable marker pens – idea from Josh Shriver

Some suggested uses are:

A give-away paper board, printed Black and White, with club contact info, and maybe the rules – very cheap. A mathematician told me that they printed the Tromp-Taylor (a.k.a logical) rules on a board intended for fellow mathematicians!
Use "standard" Go stones!
Use an encapsulated board, and write/draw on it with some/all of dry-wipe whiteboard marker; (dry-wipe) liquid chalk; washable marker for OHPs – suitable for small grid size, and no stones to disturb.
Large demo board, with bespoke "stones".

Miscellaneous

Greyscale of a grain background is cheap, and effective.
Printing on coloured paper is easy, and incurs very little extra cost. Consider doing Black and White printing of a designed/woodgrain background onto coloured paper. The script lets you choose a wide range of colured background colours. You can also hand-edit the PostScript files to do this. Coloured printing of backgrounds is much more expensive that printing onto coloured paper.
If the board is to be used more than a few times, it is probably a good idea to protect the playing surface. Rather than simply varnishing the surface, consider lamination, or encapsulation – encapsulation will make a more rigid object.

Richard Mullens, in a posting to r.g.g, suggests the use of waterproof papers. He printed the 9x9 board on Toughprint water proof A4 paper. There is another kind of waterproof A3 paper, which he had not tried. A colleague warned me that such papers may cause damage to some printers.
N.B. If we are editing the PostScript file, then, even for single-sided printing, we want to ensure that we do not print crop marks outside the (clipped) background image, and that the background image is big enough for the board size, we should ensure that board, background, clipping, and cropping (/gbsize, /bgsize, /clipsize, /cropdx, and /cropdy) are always related thus:
/clipsize <= /bgsize, and
/clipsize >= /gbsize - 1 + (2 * max(/cropdx, /cropdy))
print both a goboard, and some rules, on the same piece of paper. Ideally, the rules should be on the same side as the board (to be able to read rules while playing), so maybe print a 9x9 on A4, side-by-side with a very compact set of rules (also on A4) – print/photocopy side-by-side to get A3.

All comments/suggestions are welcome. Please send email to Harry Fearnley (please remove "ZZZ" from email address).

Last updated 2007-05-25