Visual Openings with named arrows right on the board

An interesting idea, but I have doubts about the graphical display, with rotated text above arrows:

1. Rotated text has not a good readability (see attached image).
2. It cannot be avoided that the text will cross (like in the attached image), and this may make it impossible to read the text. Especially in the early opening phase it will be hard to read the opening names (Scidb is knowing much more openings than the app "Visual Chess Openings").
3. It's hard to find a foreground color for the text with a high contrast to any board theme, and the foreground color cannot be computed. So the only choice is to add a new color attribute to the themes, but this is a bit overburdening the theme creator.

I have seen that the app "Visual Chess Openings" is displaying rotated text, but I think that other ideas with nearly the same effect will be possible (or even better):

1. Using numbered arrows, probably with different colors, and a legend elsewehere about the associated opening names.
2. Or to popup as a tooltip only the opening name of the arrow hovered with the mouse, in this case always only one opening name will be visible, but this might be sufficient. And moreover, this method is more overseeable than showing all opening names at once, the arrows are the visible hints about the different choices.

What do you think?

Is it hard to add it ?

No, it isn't hard, but it can be a bit hard for someone not familiar with the code base.

If not, I may take a shot myself to do it.

How familiar are you with Tcl/Tk?

well implementing your suggestions as options on top of the display from the picture would be ideal of course. Although I came to accept the rotated text in the Android app. As you point out it is a compromise that some might want to opt out of.

I haven't done much if anything with tcl/tk but what the heck. If you give a hint of what needs to be done this would hugely boost my motivation to get cracking on this thing.

Are you a user of this Android app, this means, do you have practical experience with this graphical visualization?

yes, when I came across this wonderful app I used it extensively.

It really cuts through the opening thicket - a big hurdle for beginners.

When I recommended this app on openstack they banned my post, because the openstack people have some issues themselves.

indeed, using the arrowbutton
http://docs.activestate.com/activetcl/8.6/bwidget/ArrowButton.html#descr

putting a dynamic help text to it would be the fastest way to achieve the text-arrow.

that would already be pretty good, with a list of the ca. 0 ... 6 possible named continuations. I tried to work the /usr/bin/scidb-beta but the Komodo IDE does not like the first exec call in line 31 of the 4 MB script.

I'm not using the BWidget package, and this arrow button would not work, because it doesn't support transparent background, So I have to solve this with SVG (for arrows) and transparent text items (for the labels).

But I'm still thinking about further alternative solutions before I'm trying to implement this stuff.

I tried to work the /usr/bin/scidb-beta but the Komodo IDE does not like the first exec call in line 31

This means that it is not properly installed, /usr/bin/scidb-beta tries to start /usr/bin/tkscidb-beta.

Oh, now I understand, It's a Komodo problem. I'm not using an IDE for Tcl, I'm not knowing any IDE which is really comfortable. The vi editor is my best tool.

I believe I absolutely see your point