Portable Game Notation is a common standard for representing chess games. A PGN file consists of two sections - a 'Header' containing tags such as [White "Kasparov, Gary"] and [Result "1/2-1/2"], and a 'Body' containing the actual moves in standard algebraic notation (SAN) along with any variations, annotation symbols and comments.
See also PGN files and Scid, Exporting, and Importing games
The PGN window can be the cause of system slowdown on very large games due to a bug in the tktext widget. Linux users are recommended to recompile using Gregor's tktext patch (in the patches directory) - but this patch may not be stable for Windows users.
The
The Chess Pieces option displays small chess figures instead of letters, to represent pieces. This feature is only available if truetype fonts are supported, and ScidChessStandard.ttf has successfully been installed. This is done as part of compiling from source by "make install", but otherwise you will find the font here
On Microsoft Windows, the fonts are installed automatically, but may not be available until Windows has updated the font cache. If they aren't available, browse the Windows\Fonts directory and double click the Scid fonts.
OS X users should also manually install the font.
The PGN menu contains options about how the game is displayed. Some of them include: Colour or Plain text, Short Header, Column Style and Scrollbar. Personalised Colours may also be selected. (Select white to revert to system background).
One slow systems, deselecting Color Display, will speed things up but with reduced features. You can also alter the format of comments and variations, choosing to display them indented on a separate line for greater visibility.