GIFs for Drawing a Go Position

The technique described on this page has now been automated. There is no need to read below for the details of how it works. Instead, go to http://www.weddslist.com/goban/#diaga and enter your diagram in the form. This will give you a page in which your diagram is presented nicely using GIFs. Look at the source of this, cut out the html between the  comments and paste it into your own page.
This html used to consist of one very long line. But the code was updated on 2001-01-24, and now generates html containing line feeds, which is much more readable.
Or, use an ascii diagram on your own page, enclose it in <goban> tags as described at http://www.weddslist.com/goban/#pageb, and link to it as described at http://www.weddslist.com/goban/#pagec.

Here are some GIFs you could use for drawing a Go position:

They are called 1.gif, 2.gif, 3.gif, 4.gif, 5.gif, 6.gif, 7.gif, 8.gif, 9.gif, b.gif, h.gif, w.gif. You may download them (try right-clicking on them) and use them. Or you can download them all at once as a ZIP file.

If you want to make your html shorter, you can rename them to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, b, h, w. Then you will include them by saying e.g. <img src="1">. However there are servers that do not allow this technique - they refuse to serve files whose extensions they do not understand.

They are used like this:
or better, like this: To see the difference (Netscape only), get rid of the enclosing table and make your browser window very narrow.

You may be tempted to make this HTML more legible by inserting some line breaks. Don't. Line breaks do no harm for users of Internet Explorer; but they cause users of Netscape to see blank horizontal lines in their diagrams.

For sets of stones which are better in most ways, you can use the ones created by Andrew Grant. These come in various sizes: 15-pixel like the above, 19-pixel, 27-pixel (shown to the left), 39-pixel and 55-pixel. There are many more images in each of his sets: as well as images like the above, there are stones of each colour numbered from 1 to 100, empty points labelled from a to z and from A to Z, and a triangled stone of each colour. They use names consistent with Simon Goss's GoFigs program, making it very easy to create html Go diagrams. Their only disadvantage, compared with the above, is that their backgrounds are white instead of transparent.

These five sets of images, each with 266 GIFs, may be downloaded.

Last updated Tue Oct 24 2017.
If you have any comments, please email the webmaster on web-master AT britgo DOT org.