It is common practice to name a font after a city or place. The Zurich fonts are named after Zurich, Switzerland the site of at least three great international chess tournaments. In 1934 Alekhine took first in a strong field of 16 that included Emanuel Lasker, Euwe, Flohr, Nimzovitch, Berstein and Bogoljubov. The 1953 Zurich International Chess Tournament was won by Smyslov over a field of 15 of the best players of that era. The tournament book, by second place finisher David Bronstein, can lay claim to be the best tournament book ever written. Fischer, Tal, Larsen and other top players competed in the 1959 Zurich International Tournament.
The Zurich chess font family includes over 30 chess fonts in both TrueType and PostScript formats and an excellent 14 page User’s Guide. Bold and Italic versions of the fonts are also included. Here is a brief summary of each of the fonts in the Zurich family.
Zurich has the complete set of upper and lower case characters available from a standard keyboard, 50 annotation symbols, 30 foreign language symbols, chess piece symbols for figurine algebraic, all the symbols for chess diagrams with a border and Zurich uses a slightly modified version of the USCF standard keymap for encoding chess information.
ZurichDiagram has the chess diagram symbols in easily remembered and accessible positions on the keyboard, six different diagram borders, checker symbols and three miscellaneous diagram symbols (star, x and +).
ZurichFigurine allows for the conversion of standard algebraic text directly into figurine algebraic by just selecting the text and changing the font. ZurichFigurine works with Dutch, English and German algebraic notation.
ZurichFigurineAlternate is similar to ZurichFigurine but it works with French, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish notation.
ZurichRotated90, ZurichRotated180 and ZurichRotated270 can be used to create diagrams for chess variants that require pieces which are rotated 90°, 180° and 270°. The rotated versions include special inside corner border pieces.
ZurichCA, ZurichDiagramCA, ZurichCBWIN and ZurichDiagramCBWIN are compatible with Chess Assistant and ChessBase for Windows. These fonts are only included with the Windows version.
ZurichCBMAC and ZurichDiagramCBMAC are compatible with ChessBase for Macintosh. These fonts are only included with the Macintosh version.
The following amazing game between Boris Spassky and David Bronstein is shown using the ZurichDiagram and ZurichFigurine fonts.
