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I am looking for an examples of a free chess set icons. It would be nice if the place allow to download them, but this is not really important, as I will still need to redraw them in svg format.

Just to explain what I mean by chess set icons. I need them to customize user's pieces on my chess server. Basically I am looking for examples like this (image from Wikipedia):

enter image description here

but not like this (image from TheChessPiece): enter image description here

Also is it possible that some particular chess icons are patented and hence I can not use them?

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  • I'd recommend the chess symbols in "DejaVu Serif", a free font. I think they're quite good-looking.
    – lily
    Sep 11, 2014 at 15:08
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    Icons aren't patentable, but some might be copyrighted.
    – Pete Becker
    Sep 11, 2014 at 15:49
  • @lily According to this page, the chess pieces (unicodes U+2654 to U+265F) seem to be missing for DejaVu Serif? They exist for DejaVu Sans, though.
    – HelloGoodbye
    Nov 12 at 17:00

5 Answers 5

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You might look for a chess set font. Here are several. Licensing information is included. It looks like they have been scanned from old books in some cases.

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  • Wow, this is exactly what I was searching for. The quality is bad, but this gives me an example how should I draw them. Thanks for a swift reply.
    – Salvador Dali
    Sep 11, 2014 at 11:21
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    and actually I am wrong. Only previews do not look nice, inside the zip folder there are fonts, which have nice quality.
    – Salvador Dali
    Sep 11, 2014 at 11:23
  • A closer look at the page will tell you that the majority of the fonts mentioned have "designers". None were scanned. Please pay attention and respect the work freely given to the chess community.
    – hsmyers
    Oct 11, 2016 at 0:25
  • When using a font, though, I guess the white part of the interior of the pieces are not going to become white, but instead transparent?
    – HelloGoodbye
    Nov 12 at 16:51
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PyChess has about 20 fonts and SVGs bundled in its source code:

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

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  • 3
    The cat one appeals to the old cat lady in me.
    – Paul Elfish
    Sep 11, 2014 at 16:07
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    @PaulElfish Though it would be rather humiliating to be checkmated by a litter-tray...
    – David Richerby
    Sep 11, 2014 at 17:18
  • The fact that this project is licences under GPL v.3 means that any other project that uses anything from this project (including images) also has to be licensed under GPL v.3 and thus also be open source, doesn’t it?
    – HelloGoodbye
    Nov 12 at 12:28
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Unicode has chess piece icons in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_symbols_in_Unicode

This means you could look for a font which includes the chess symbol unicode block and has a license which fits your purpose. Most fonts are in TrueType format which is already vector-based and can be converted to SVG with Apache SVG Font Converter. This would mean you wouldn't even need to redraw them manually.

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  • Have you seen that my example is actually taken from there? Why are you sending me back my example as an answer?
    – Salvador Dali
    Sep 12, 2014 at 3:14
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    @SalvadorDali Do you have a citation in your question? If not, I'm not sure why you expect someone not to post this. +1 to this answer.
    – user2398
    Sep 12, 2014 at 5:20
  • @BroSlow click the link in sasha's answer. Check the image in my question. As you will notice - they are the same. I did not include the direct link to the page, because I wanted the image to be visible from the beginning.
    – Salvador Dali
    Sep 12, 2014 at 6:05
  • @SalvadorDali you still could had put an attribution beside your image, like I did now – I hope I found the right source for your second image.
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Sep 12, 2014 at 19:27
  • @SalvadorDali I suggested an edit to the answer which might explain how this answer could help you.
    – Philipp
    Sep 13, 2014 at 8:57
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I'm sure unicode has a range of codes for both white and black game pieces.

Use a font like Arial or Tahoma. In the U2600 Range.

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When you are looking for more interesting Chess icons including heterodox pieces, look here for a great list:

http://www.chessvariants.org/index/imagequery.php?type=DTP&numberofcols=2&displayauthor=1&displayinventor=1&usethisheading=Desktop+Publishing+Resources+By+Image

If you are going for the simple, just use Unicode.

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