EDIT 1, 20/04/2020
In my question, I focused on the game Vachier-Lagrave vs Carlsen, Sinquefield Cup 7th, Saint Louis, 28/08/2019. It has annotations in english in my ChessBase database, and it has not annotations anymore at any further step of the conversion. Fine.
I took a look at another game : Morozevich vs Carlsen, Biel, 31/7/2006. This one has also annotations in english in my ChessBase database. And at the end of the conversion, when I open the sg4+si4+sn4 in Scid on the go, I see annotations in english but in german (!) as well :
and the same happens if I open them in Scid vs. Pc :
We can see that in both Scid on the go and Sci vs. Pc, comments in english and german both appear, distinguished by <en>
and <de>
, whereas in the screnshot from ChessBase, only english comments appear.
So there are game whose annotations are exported, and there are games whose annotations aren't. The only difference that I see between this two games is that one has only english annotations whereas the second has annotations in both english and german. What is strange is that it is the game with annotations in one language only that loses the annotations after the database conversion. (Would the converse happen, namely, that a game with annotations in two different languages loses these annotations after the database conversion, I would have somehow understood : maybe the parsing of the annotations, in some of the conversion steps, is wrecked by the presence of the languages and bugs, like in some weird serialization bugs etc.)
At the Scidb step, on can see the Vachier-Carlsen game :
that has no annotations, and the Morozevich-Carlsen game :
that has here only english annotations.
This is really weird.
My setup is the following :
- I have windows 10 + ChessBase + ChessBase official bases that always contains games that are commented
- I have a android phone on which I used scid on the go to consult games in various of my database
ChessBase databases have many format, but let's stick to one, cbv for instance. Database for scid on the go use the sg4+si4+sn4 format. For the conversion
- I backup a ChessBase database without encryption in a cbv format
- using this uncbv utiliy written by antoyo I do a
uncbv extract mydatabase.cbv
to get a bunch of databases files - using scidb that I compiled (under latest update of latest version of 64bits Ubuntu) from latest source code, I open the database from the files that I got in the previous step (more precisely, from the .cbh file)
- I convert it in the "Scid" format within Scidb, by right-clicking on the datable and choosing export
The database I started from contains comments (variation+annotations) where as the one used in Scidb contains only variations but no comments :
(Ubuntu+Scidb on the left, Windows+ChessBase on the right).
If you open in ChessBack the cbv backup, its games obvioulsy contain annotations. So that :
- either the files produced by
uncbv
are stripped the games from the database from their annotations - or their aren't but Scidb doesn't handle annotations
Does someone have an idea ?
After a quick inspection, I don't see any annotation discarding uncbv
source code. Plus, among the files that uncbv
produces, the .cbh can be opened by ChessBase, and it yields a database where the games that were annotated are still annotated.
Hence I conclude that Scidb does not handle annotations. More precisely : if in Scidb you open the .cbh file among :
then games that should have their annotations won't have them. Does someone know how to handle this ?
What is strange is that in Scidb in the database, I see an "Annotators" tab :