From: "Daniel C. Sheppard" 
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess.analysis
Subject: Re: non-english PGN NAGs
Organization: Nuffield Radio Astronomy Labs, Jodrell Bank, U.K.
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PGN has a crutial important advantage over other chess game formats - it
is a public domain format.  There is no need to purchase dedicated
software for it to be of any use.  It downsize is memory consumption. 
The PGN standard says that a compressed version is under development
(where?).  This would be useful to have.  Universality would be
maintained (as it would be public domain) with gains in file access
time, download time and storage space.  The file would not be human
readable, but simple extraction routines could be created to overcome
this.
PGN files are available everywhere (FIDE WCC games were only made
available in PGN and converters are freely available to convert to and
from PGN).
I would be interested in helping with any project that yields anything
like the above (is this anything like PGP?).  However, universal
recognition is a must for any file format to be a success.
Incidently, PGP usually means Pretty Good Privacy so this name could be
confusing.  Perhaps PGN2?
Daniel Sheppard
Paul Onstad wrote:
> 
> > I hope someone can help me with this. I am currently writing a program
> > that auto-formats PGN files (as well as a new file format I'm working on
> > called PGP "Portable Game Publication"). What I'm looking for are
> > translations of the PGN Standard's predefined meanings for NAG values
> > 1..139. I'm hoping to provide direct translation into the following
> > languages: french, german, dutch, swedish, danish, norwegian, italian,
> > spanish and russian. Translations into other languages would also be
> > welcomed and I would certainly try to include support for those
> > languages.
> >
> > NAG    Interpretation
> >
> > 0    null annotation
> > 1    good move (traditional "!")
> > 2    poor move (traditional "?")
> > 3    very good move (traditional "!!")
> 
> 
> Just saw your message... Don't most of the NAGs (in use) have Informat
> equivalents? In other words, the symbols encoded are already meant to be
> understandable in "all" languages.
> 
> The PGN authors went a little overboard in trying to come up with a code
> for everything but if you observe what actually gets used (ChessBase;
> Chess Assistant), it is a rather small subset of the total. Those chess
> bases then are probably the only ones who really care about the NAGs and
> they have graphic equivalents for them once the games are in a base and
> viewable.
> 
>   -Paul
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