The SVG output from this version may not work in your browser (Firefox has problems, certainly) so I would recommend using Inkscape for editing, printing and producing PDF output.

cwc - A Crossword Compiler

cwc is a very useful crossword compiler program written by Lars Christensen which is based on the algorithms described in Sik Cambon Jensen's thesis "Design and Implementation of Crossword Compilation Programs Using Serial Approaches". I have not been able to contact Lars to ask whether he is still maintaining cwc, since the email address (larsch@cs.auc.dk) on the two webpages I've found for the program no longer works and Lars Chistensen is a very common name. However, I wanted to release a version with a few changes, hence this page. If you would like to contribute changes to this version, or have any other feedback please email me.

The original web pages for cwc are here:

• On sourceforge.com, but with no source code
• On gtoal.com, with a link to source code for version 1.0.1

In addition, the original source code is commit 3f496e3d67d1ed0f45, tagged cwc-version-1.0.1, in the git repository.

For further details about the algorithms employed by cwc, please refer to the pages above.

Authors

Download

You can download a tar archive of version 1.0.2 or clone the repository using git with:

   git clone git://repo.or.cz/cwc.git

Changes

For a full list of changes, see the the git logs; those points below are summaries.

In version 1.0.2:

• A number of changes necessary to make cwc compile on recent Linux distributions.
• In normal grids, assign clue numbers in the standard way, and list those clues in the ASCII output.
• There's now an option ("-x test.svg") for outputting an SVG version of your crossword so that you can edit it in Inkscape to produce a page of publication quality.

Things To Do

• The SVG files generated have useful IDs for each of the elements on the page, so it would be nice to write some Javascript to allow one to fill in crosswords online.
• At the moment there's not an easy way to set the difficulty level of the crossword other than by using different word lists. It would be relatively simple to score words in my gigantic word list for easiness, and it would be nice to use that information to set the level of difficult of the crossword. (Or at least report the distribution of word difficulty.)

License Information

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

You can email me (Mark Longair) at: