How can I scan a chessboard and obtain its FEN?

Question

I am planning to create a chess puzzle book for beginners. Diagrams need to be published in the book. Right now I have all the materials in PDF. But I need a software to create diagrams for a particular chess position. Is there any way to scan chess diagrams from a PDF?

What format should the diagrams be in? Postscript or something else? — Scounged, Jun 05 '16 at 12:01
Please answer Scounged's comment. Your question is very unclear: you *have* diagrams in your PDF and you want to *create diagrams* ??? — , Aug 25 '16 at 11:11

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered May 26 '20 at 19:36

9

This website has a chess ebook reader available for scanning chess diagrams from PDF: https://chessvision.ai/

Additionally they also have browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox which is really handy in scanning images of positions on any web page.

answered May 26 '20 at 19:36

Amit Dash

379
2
13

1

I really like the extension, very easy to use and so far accurate. – user134593 Nov 29 '21 at 02:33
ebook feature of chess vision is cool. But, their board editor is not working sometimes, probably because they are using lichess behind the scene (and lichess suspects the tool as a bot, I guess). – Cyriac Antony Dec 05 '22 at 01:42

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 15 '17 at 14:02

I wrote a program that can recognize positions from books and magazines and give you the FEN. Here is the web interface for Chessputzer

You can upload the image or paste directly from the clipboard.

Note: it is designed for the the most common fonts used in print. It won't work for images from Chessbase etc. For that, use Fenbot.

My aim was to make it good enough to read blurry images from old chess books so it should be pretty tolerant of artifacts and such.

Arpine S. · Answer 3 · 2016-08-25T10:43:23.670

6

Chessfimee can perfectly serve you.

It scans and analyses chessboards with chess diagrams, puzzles. All you need is to use the camera to take a photo of a chess diagram from books, papers, even LCD screens (PDFs, other sources). Also you can share the chess position (FEN) with other chess applications.

An iOS version will be coming soon.

edited Aug 25 '16 at 10:43

answered Aug 22 '16 at 12:58

Arpine S.

61
1
2

Name of the tool changed to chessify (worth mentioning) – Cyriac Antony Dec 05 '22 at 01:36

score 4 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:48

4

Try the following. You upload the image, it scans and generates FEN. I don't know if it will read a pdf but converting a pdf to a common graphic format is not hard.

Chess Grabber

I tried it using the diagram from this posting. It generated its determination of the diagram and this FEN:

rn1qk1nr/Pp4P1/2p2P2/4P2p/1bp5/2NbPPP1/PP2N1BP/B1BQ1RK1 w kq - 0 1

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:48

Community

1

answered Jun 05 '16 at 14:15

Tony Ennis

20,145
1
44
86

I tried it and it took black pawns on dark squares to be white pawns. So it is not perfect. One has to be careful. – MichalRyszardWojcik Jun 05 '16 at 17:32
Chess Grabber seems to be buggy. – Arun J Jun 03 '19 at 07:17
Chess Grabber doesn't work if Adobe Flash is blocked ... I think Flash is basically deprecated now. Maybe archive.org can support it? – Purplejacket Dec 05 '20 at 17:23

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 06 '20 at 19:55

1

CheSScan app available on Play/App Store does what you are looking for.

chesscan.com

Disclaimer: I am the developer of the app.

answered Sep 06 '20 at 19:55

Knight Forked

111
2

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 06 '20 at 20:14

0

Search "Chess diagram fonts". There is a LOT of stuff out there

answered Sep 06 '20 at 20:14

Philip Roe

7,875
1
16
31

This is the right way to do it, I think. Fewer mishaps. – friscodelrosario Sep 07 '20 at 06:20

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Sep 07 '20 at 06:17

0

There's also ChessOCR, which I found useless, but as we always say, your mileage may vary.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kgroth.chessocr&hl=en_US

answered Sep 07 '20 at 06:17

friscodelrosario

1,940
10
12

How can I scan a chessboard and obtain its FEN?

7 Answers7

Linked

Related