I have begun work on a program to play checkers, tentatively called Milhouse. I’m mostly doing it to keep my programming and research skills tuned up, but also because I’ve always enjoyed working on game playing programs. To make it more interesting, I’ve decided to write it as a literate program using Norm Ramsey’s simple noweb system.

But to do a good job, I wanted to be able to intersperse diagrams of checkers positions into the source code. That doesn’t seem too difficult, since I have some experience producing documents using LaTeX. But the one thing that was lacking was a font to use for checkers positions.

So I made one.

Or at least, I’ve prototyped one. The diagram on the right is the starting position at checkers, rendered in 22pt using a Postscript Type 3 font that i coded up by hand. It’s not perfect, but it looks more of less like I imagined it would.

Unfortunately, you can’t use type3 fonts directly in TeX/LaTeX, so I still have some work to do. Still, kind of a fun way to waste some time while waiting for frames to render.