WordGrid - Wordseach Grid Generator

by Richard Mawhood

WordGrid makes wordsearch grids in a variety of shapes. This application creates word search puzzles, and can be loaded by clicking on the icon in the RISC User menu system. The choices menu can be opened by clicking with Select or Adjust buttons on the WordGrid icon bar icon, as well as choosing Choices from the icon bar menu. Your preferences can be saved by clicking on the Save Choices button. They are automatically loaded when the program is run, but if you make alterations, they can be reloaded by clicking on the Load Choices button. Clicking on Defaults returns to the program's internal settings.

Size & Shape
You can let the program make decisions about the size of grid to use by selecting Auto. If you do so, the grid will be of fairly generous proportions. Three regular grid shapes - rectangle, ellipse and diamond are offered in Auto mode.

If you select Custom, you can set the height and width of the grid using the arrow buttons. If Lock is selected, there will always be the same number of rows as columns whether you alter the height or the width. In Custom mode extra shapes are available on the Shapes menu, but their dimensions are fixed. You can create your own shapes and add them to the list (see below).

Words
Here you can select the directions for the words to go in: Horizontal, Vertical, and Diagonal. You must select at least one direction.
You can also select Backwards if you wish; this will only apply to selected directions.

Fill with
You can opt to fill with Upper Case (capital letters), Lower Case (small letters), or any selection of characters. In the latter case you can either type them directly into the writable field or drag a plain text file onto the Choices window.

Such a file must be a text file consisting of a single line of characters ending with a new line. This is easily prepared in Edit. You could have different files combining both upper and lower case letters, or including foreign accented characters, etc.

Output
You can opt to output the Grid as a Draw file or as plain text. If you output a Drawfile, you can choose the font, font size and font height. You can also choose whether a square will be drawn around each letter, and for regular shaped grids, whether a border is drawn around the whole grid (this is often preferable to squares, but you can have both).

Making a wordsearch
Type a list of words you wish to include in the wordsearch (no spaces, and a new line for each word), using a text editor like Edit. Make sure that you finish with a new line, by pressing Return after the last word, and save the file.
Drag the file containing your list of words onto the WordGrid icon. A beep indicates that the file has been processed. You can now Save the complete wordsearch grid and/or the solution by clicking menu on the icon bar icon and clicking on Save.

Finding the Words
To find the resulting position of the words click select on the icon bar icon, move to the Save option and Save Answers.

Creating new shapes
Inside the WordGrid application directory there is a Sprite file called Shapes. To add a new shape, load this file into Paint and make a new mode 9 sprite, maximum dimensions 32 x 32 pixels. Fill the whole sprite with colour 1, then colour the shape in colour 0 (white). Give the sprite a meaningful name, and save the sprite file (there are a few shapes already included). The new shape will appear on the Shape menu and may be selected in Custom mode. These shapes may also be deleted, but DO NOT DELETE the sprite "grid" - it is needed by the program.


 Copyright RISC User Magazine 1995