Create your own puzzles and crosswords

Crosswords, wordsearches and Sudoku puzzles are not only fun, they’re good for you, too, giving the brain a thorough workout. Puzzles are printed in the national press, and for those who crave more there’s a host of specialist puzzle magazines, but these don’t come cheap – pick up a serious puzzle habit to while away the free hours and you could start to notice a dent in your wallet.

Fortunately, there’s another way that’s cheaper and more entertaining: using a computer to create puzzles. This is a great way to make puzzles for friends and family but it’s also handy if you want to publish puzzles on a website or in a newsletter as it allows you to tailor the content to your readers – not to mention avoiding the copyright problems that could arise from “borrowing” a puzzle from elsewhere.

Whether you prefer cryptic clues or number crunching, in this feature we’ll explain how to create your own conundrums.

Cross talk
Considering the vast number of people that love solving crosswords, few people ever try to create them besides professional compilers and schoolteachers. They’re popular with the latter as a means of spicing up tedious chores such as learning vocabulary for foreign languages and reinforcing key terms for other subjects.

Of course, the sort of crossword a teacher knocks up is a far cry from the ones found in a serious newspaper with a symmetrical 15x15 grid of cryptic clues, but the majority of users are very forgiving provided the clues are fair and the puzzle is solvable and free of spelling mistakes.

With little effort, though, you can create crosswords at varying levels of complexity. The whole process is made particularly simple if you use a free program called Eclipse Crossword. What’s more, if you’re involved with a communal or business organisation that produces a newsletter or runs a website, Eclipse Crossword puts no restrictions on how its crosswords are distributed.

The program can even generate the required code to place a crossword on a web page. Naturally, crosswords may also be printed on paper for people to solve in the old-fashioned way.

Download the Eclipse Crossword program and click the button to download the small setup file. This file itself doesn’t actually contain all the information that’s needed by the program, so once it’s downloaded, double-click it and the computer will download the extra information automatically before installing the program.

Once it’s installed the program will no longer require access to the internet. See later for a step-by-step guide to creating your first crossword.

Crosswords designed in Eclipse can be printed on paper or turned into two types of web page: interactive puzzles meant to be solved online or static web pages designed for printing.

Using the Publish option, it is also possible to save puzzles in various text and graphical formats for use within other programs. Choose RTF format for opening in Microsoft Word, WMF as a picture format for printing at home or Postscript (EPS) for publications that will be laid out in a desktop publishing program and commercially printed.

One word of warning, though: we wouldn’t recommend using the interactive online crosswords if you plan on offering a prize, as it’s relatively easy for viewers to cheat by examining the code that makes up the crossword web page.