#150 Problem with SCID's format for exporting PGN files

[Timothy Mueller]

I recently upgraded my Macbook OS to Catalina, and I was sad that SCID will no longer run in that environment, because I really enjoyed using it. So I began using ChessX, a different open source database system. When I tried to open a PGN file that had been exported by SCID, ChessX would not open it correctly, and gave access to only one game in a pgn that had 103 games. So I contacted ChessX developers, and they found that it was caused by the way SCID vs Mac handles line endings when exporting to PGN on a Mac. Here is the developer's info, from Jens Nissen:

It's a bug in SCID, I already suspected it. To be portable, PGN defines line ends:

"4.3.2.2: Archival storage and the newline character
   Export format should also be used for archival storage. Here, "archival" storage is defined as storage that may be accessed by a variety of computing systems. The only extra requirement for archival storage is that the newline character have a specific representation that is independent of its value for a particular computing system's text file usage. The archival representation of a newline is the ASCII control character LF (line feed, decimal value 10, hexadecimal value 0x0a)."

ChessX expects line ends according to the PGN specification (\n) and it also accepts line ends in Windows convention (\r\n). SCID for Mac generates line ends in Mac OS convention (\r) which is not allowed in PGN and not supported by ChessX. You should file a bug report to the SCID vs. Mac developers.

Attached is the pgn file that I could not open in ChessX. I hope the above is helpful. Thank you,

Tim Mueller